George Orwell Quotes

I've felt a little culpable that we entrepreneurs often invent businesses just to drive people to buy more things.

Overconsumption is the mother of all environmental problems. For the first time in the history of capitalism, consumption itself has become controversial.

Human society sustains itself by transforming nature into garbage.

If the rest of the world aspires to our way of life ... we'll bury ourselves in waste.

For every person in the world to reach the present U.S. level of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet earths.

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.

I think about capitalism, consumerism, our consumptive nature as a species approaching the 21st century. I certainly don't have the answers.

Unfortunately, our affluent society has also been an effluent society.

We're not going to persuade people in the developing world to go without, but neither can we afford a planet on which everyone lives like an American. Billions more people living in suburbs and driving SUVs to shopping malls is a recipe for planetary suicide. We can't even afford to continue that way of life ourselves.

We are 5 percent of the global population and consume a third of the total resources - on some level we should all feel guilty relative to the world.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.

Humanity's become a product and when humanity is a product, you get Auschwitz and you get Chair.

They are feeding the world that will devour them and their children.

The affluent society has become an effluent society. The 6 percent of the world's population in the United States produces 70 percent or more of the world's solid wastes

The United States has consumed in the last 50 years more natural resources than the rest of the entire human race for all of history.

We have grown up in a culture thinking that our energy resources were inexhaustible and without impact.

Since the mid-1970s, people have been consuming more resources than the planet’s natural capital can replenish.

Environmental degradation has one cause above all others: the propensity of human beings to take the benefit and leave the costs to someone else, preferably someone far away in space or time, whose protests can be safely ignored.

If I think too much about all of those Chinese factories where all the stuff in a Wal-Mart is made, I get that woozy feeling you get when you see ducks covered in crude oil.

Tearing down an old house and building a new one is the most wasteful thing we do as humans.

There's something quite shocking in this idea that everything is disposable and that people don't care for things anymore.

We are living and consuming more than we need, and this impacts our survival.

The idea is the least labor and capital and resources you put together and the more you accumulate the better capitalist you are. So the suggestion I will make to you is that the idea of constant accumulation, which is what America is about, what consumerism, NAFTA are about, means that you always take more than you need and you don't leave the rest. So I suggest that it is possible from an indigenous world view that capitalism is inherently out of order with natural law.

If we just stop producing stuff, if we stop being so capitalist, we stop taking resources from other third world countries, we'll be happy.

All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm.