Herbert Stein Quotes

If something is unsustainable and “cannot go on forever”, it tends to stop.

Every great thing has to come to an end at some point. It's the way that it goes.

The recognition that things that are not sustainable will eventually come to an end does not give us much of a guide to whether the transition will be calm or exciting.

No man can always have riches.

Economists are very good at saying that something cannot go on forever, but not so good at saying when it will stop.

Our whole economy has become a waste economy, in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared in the world, if the process itself is not to come to a sudden catastrophic end..

In football, nothing lasts forever.

A lot of people make the error of thinking rugby is going to last forever and they need to quickly discover that that isn't the case.

Transience is one of the fundamental characteristics both of the human condition and of the political order.

I think everything is temporary.

One of the problems with industrialism is that it's based on the premise of more and more. It has to keep expanding to keep going. More and more television sets. More and more cars. More and more steel, and more and more pollution. We don't question whether we need any more or what we'll do with them. We just have to keep on making more and more if we are to keep going. Sooner or later it's going to collapse. ... Look what we have done already with the principle of more and more when it comes to nuclear weapons.

Nothing is taken care of forever.

Nothing is permanent.

A scale is only in balance for a brief second. Inevitably the pendulum swings. It's impossible to maintain.

I'm sure that whatever changed is only temporary. It will change again.

Now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.

Nothing lasts forever, not even the best machines. And everything can be reused. - Hephaestus

A stone lies in a river; a piece of wood is jammed against it; dead leaves, drifting logs, and branches caked with mud collect; weeds settle there, and soon birds have made a nest and are feeding their young among the blossoming water plants. Then the river rises and the earth is washed away. The birds depart, the flowers wither, the branches are dislodged and drift downward; no trace is left of the floating island but a stone submerged by the water; - such is our personality.

Everything. Things you lost. Things you’re gonna lose. Everything. Here’s where it all ties together.

Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise.

I know that human happiness never remains long in the same place.

Karma chameleon: we come and go, we come and go.

The world is changing every moment, and is therefore unreal. It has non permanent existence.

Can capitalism survive? No. I do not think it can.

Not even need and love can defeat fate.