Ray Bradbury Quotes

Going to a junkyard is a sobering experience. There you can see the ultimate destination of almost everything we desired.

The path of civilization is paved with tin cans.

We live in a disposable society. It's easier to throw things out than to fix them. We even give it a name - we call it recycling.

Every conflict is emblematic of the throwaway culture.

We Americans are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they are produced, or what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.

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

On the one hand, we're constantly told about recycling and cutting back, and on the other hand we have to buy the next gadget that comes along three weeks after the last one you bought. It's absolutely insane. We've been suckered into buying and buying and upgrading and upgrading. We're being given two very different mantras at the moment, I think.

the metabolism of a consumer society requires it continually to eat and excrete, every day throwing itself away in plastic bags.

We live in a disposable society. We throw so much away. But it doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from the planet and it comes from future generations' lives.

We can't have landfills forever, and we can't ask others to accept our trash.

I have always been interested in garbage: What it says about us. What in there embarrasses us, and what we can't bear to part with. Where it goes and how much of it there is. How it endures. What it might be like to work with it every day.

Human society sustains itself by transforming nature into garbage.

To be rich nowadays merely means to possess a large number of poor objects.

Culture and possessions, there is the bourgeoisie for you.

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

Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.

We live in a society that, for the most part, is morally and spiritually bankrupt. Our culture is a culture of consumerism. How sustainable is that?

Sooner or later, all magazines end up in the toilet.

For every new thing that I buy, I have to throw something out.

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

...the first sign of civilization is always trash.

Everything we personally own that’s made, sold, shipped, stored, cleaned, and ultimately thrown away does some environmental harm every step of the way, harm that we’re either directly responsible for or is done on our behalf.

Junk takes everything and gives nothing but insurance against junk sickness.

A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, for such a society is a house built upon sand.

There's so much plastic in this culture that vinyl leopard skin is becoming an endangered synthetic.