Denis Villeneuve Quotes

Being able to afford everything you desire is not, by any means, the worst thing that can happen to you. But, depressingly, and more profoundly, neither is it the best.

I'd rather be rich and miserable than poor and miserable.

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.

Why should Americans go on with their lives as normal, worrying about calories and hair loss, while other people are worrying about where they are going to get their next piece of bread?

And living in Australia I am relatively well off.

It's clear to you immediately that you can have anything you want when you have cancer.

There's a big difference between being privileged and being spoilt. My parents always said, 'Spoilt means ruined, and you're not ruined, just incredibly fortunate.'

My generation have had it good, and I am really troubled by what we have done with it.

There has to be a way to live the life you're accustomed to and not sacrifice things. Americans are not very good about sacrificing.

When I first began visiting West Germany in the early 1980s, I was startled by the contrast between Birmingham, where I went to school, and affluent Cologne. My host family, the lovely Schumachers, always had an opulent array of grapes on the table; they were better dressed than anyone I knew in Britain.

The worst thing you can do to a child, and I've seen it happen so many times, is the silver spoon.

We Americans sit at the head of the banquet table, as we have done for a century. Our standard of living is luxurious by any measure.

I sense very little appetite for green efforts to persuade people to accept a frozen or declining standard of living for the sake of the environment. Recessions remind us that economic retreat or stagnation is painful, whatever the goal.

By a lot of people's standards, I lived a very privileged life. I never wanted for attention, I never wanted for material things. In some ways, I was probably spoiled because I never had to share. And I was doted on.

We may feel the pain of falling back from a level of affluence to which we have grown accustomed, but most people in developed countries are still, by historical standards, extraordinarily well off.

When people evaluate their life, they compare themselves to a standard of what a successful life is, and it turns out that standard tends to be universal: People in Togo and Denmark have the same idea of what a good life is, and a lot of that has to do with money and material prosperity.

I believe that the average guy in the street will give up a great deal, if he really understands the cost of not giving it up. In fact, we may find that, while we're drastically cutting our energy consumption, we're actually raising our standard of living.

Compared to people in Africa, I think we've all had privileged upbringings.

I am so, so lucky. I am the luckiest girl in the world, really. And still with access to everything I could possibly want I still say 'Oh dear, what am I going to wear today?' There's no ending to that question!

I think the word rich is all relative.

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

Economic advance is not the same thing as human progress.

We want the same standard of life Canadians enjoy and take for granted.

We face the question whether a still higher standard of living is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free.

If I work 60 hours a week, for example, and I make much more money than someone who works 40 hours a week, is my standard of living higher? I suppose it depends on your values. If I do not have time, because I work 60 hours a week, to spend time with my children, I may not consider myself to have a high standard of living.