John W. Gardner Quotes

One industrial age belief is that GDP or GNP is a measure of progress. I don't care if you're the President of China or the U.S., if your country doesn't grow, you're in trouble. But we all know that beyond a certain level of material need, further material acquisition doesn't make people happier.

We have come to accept bigger and bigger things as meaning greater and greater efficiency, more and more prosperity and more and more freedom. The two do not go together of necessity.

Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence.

In modern society, where most people live in cities, and where both needs and wishes are absolved through the same remote agency - money - the distinction between wishes and needs has altogether vanished.

As a consequence, progress has come to mean simply more power, more profit, more productivity, more paper prosperity, all of which are convertible into standards concerned only with size or magnitude rather than quality or excellence.

The very fact that we find it hard to conceive of an alternative to limitless economic growth is an indication of our spiritual condition.

The affluent society makes no meaningful distinction between luxury and necessity.

We must embark on a bold new program for ... the improvement and growth of undeveloped areas. More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery .... For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and skill to relieve the suffering of these people.

Economic advance is not the same thing as human progress.

20 centuries of progress have brought the average citizen a vote, a national anthem, a Ford, a bank account and a high opinion of himself but not the capacity to live in high density without befouling and denuding his environment.

We have been proud of our industrial achievements, but we have not hitherto stopped thoughtfully enough to count the human cost

In the affluent society no useful distinction can be made between luxuries and necessaries.

The Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities… Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

Our vision and commitment is towards the country's progress, its place in the world and the happiness of its people.

In our enthusiasm to dominate nature and to produce more material good - goods - we have transformed means into ends.

We no longer see the world as a single entity. We've moved to cities and we think the economy is what gives us our life, that if the economy is strong we can afford garbage collection and sewage disposal and fresh food and water and electricity. We go through life thinking that money is the key to having whatever we want, without regard to what it does to the rest of the world.

More and more Americans feel threatened by runaway technology, by large-scale organization, by overcrowding. More and more Americans are appalled by the ravages of industrial progress, by the defacement of nature, by man-made ugliness. If our society continues at its present rate to become less livable as it becomes more affluent, we promise all to end up in sumptuous misery.

...children born today-in both the industrialized world and developing countries-will live longer and be healthier, they will get more food, a better education, a higher standard of living, more leisure time and far more possibilities-without the global environment being destroyed.

Used to the conditions of a capitalistic environment, the average American takes it for granted that every year business makes something new and better accessible to him. Looking backward upon the years of his own life, he realizes that many implements that were totally unknown in the days of his youth and many others which at that time could be enjoyed only by a small minority are now standard equipment of almost every household.

America was in full swing now, all the papers said so, and people were rushing forward, leaving behind the horrors of war. She understood the reasons, but they were rushing, like Lon, toward long hours and profits, neglecting the things that brought beauty to the world.

We get richer and richer in filthier and filthier communities until we reach a final state of affluent misery - crocus on a garbage heap.

We have a high standard of living. ... In Norway, we've tripled our income since 1970. In the rest of western Europe, income has merely doubled.

The societies of consumption and squandering of material resources are incompatible with the idea of economic growth and a clean planet.

The great challenge of the twenty-first century is to raise people everywhere to a decent standard of living while preserving as much of the rest of life as possible.

The more people there are, the more food we need, the more space we occupy, the more resources and consumer goods we wish to have and the more development has to take place