Christoph Waltz Quotes

What we are doing is, rather than living on the interest of our basic biological capital, we're using up our capital, so we're dipping into our capital. We're using up what should be our children's and grandchildren's legacy.

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

We treat a planet at crisis point as an externality that can be shunted into a future generation. We continue to act as if we had the natural resources of several planets, not one.

Both the United States and the world economy have already reached - and surpassed - their sustainable physical limits. Ground water is being drawn down, soils eroded, forests cut faster than they grow, fish caught faster than they reproduce, non-renewable fossil fuels burnt without developing substitutes.

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

It's not about the fish; it's not about the pollution; it's not about the climate change. It's about us and our greed and our need for growth and our inability to imagine a world that is different from the selfish world we live in today.

what man calls civilizationalways results in desertsman is never on the squarehe uses up the fat and greenery of the eartheach generation wastes a little moreof the future with greed and lust for riches

You know the old expression "We haven't inherited the world from our parents, we've borrowed it from our children"? Well it's just not true. We haven't borrowed anything.

We are no longer inheriting the Earth from our parents, we are stealing it from our children.

Rapid population growth and technological innovation, combined with our lack of understanding about how the natural systems of which we are a part work, have created a mess.

I haven't inherited the earth from my parents, I am borrowing it from my children.

This is suicidal... our home is the biosphere. That's a very thin layer of air, water and land where all life exists. It's fixed, it can't grow, and yet we cling to this idea that the economy can grow forever. And it must. Well, it can't.

Does this planet have enough resources so seven or eight billion can have the same level of consumption and waste that today is seen in rich societies? It is this level of hyper-consumption that is harming our planet.

I think a lot of us are increasingly recognizing that the dominant culture is killing the planet.

For too long, humanity has acted with an outrageous lack of responsibility. We wanted everything for ourselves: greed, really. We failed to look at the overall picture and did not take into consideration those with whom we share the world.

Once humans traded their hunter-gatherer existences for more settled communities, we began a quest to make our lives better and more comfortable, but we've also been sucking precious finite resources from our environment ever since.

The human world is a long way from meeting the needs of the present, and it is borrowing massively from the future - not only by piling up money debt, but also by degrading the resources from which all real wealth ultimately comes.

If we go on the way we have, the fault is our greed and if we are not willing to change, we will disappear from the face of the globe, to be replaced by the insect.

I do not believe you can have infinite population or economic growth in a finite world. We are living on the shoulders of some awesome geometric curves.

We are using resources as if we had two planets, not one. There can be no 'plan B' because there is no 'planet B.'

We are borrowing money from future generations. We are borrowing the carbon impact, the resource impact from future generations to get stuff cheap now. We have swept the dirt and dust from our society under the carpet - but this carpet is on other side of the planet.

The earth is the Lord's fullness thereof: this is no longer a hollow dictum of religion, but a directive for economic action toward human brotherhood.

The United States has long thought of itself as the land of infinite plenty, and historically we did have abundant resources. But now we are gradually exhausting our fisheries, our topsoil, our water. On top of that, we're coming to the end of world resources.

Most individuals have always thought themselves not big enough or significant enough to have an effect on the whole planet, a notion which conversely made them think they could afford big arrogance and big greed over its resources.

Infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility.