Robert Benchley Quotes

Consuming less means throwing away less, while reusing things actually helps to save the planet as well as the pennies.

Even clingfilm - if it's gone over a salad bowl, take it off, use it again. I wash out carrier bags; I save brown paper from parcels. I save string; I save ribbons. I separate all my bits and pieces.

I clearly understood the concept of wise use before I ever heard the actual words, for my father wouldn't allow us to waste anything.

Most of us have heard the saying, 'Cleanliness is next to godliness.' That's a sentiment I value, but another virtue has inspired me to revise that saying. As far as I'm concerned, what's next to godliness is resourcefulness.

All things are cheap to the saving, dear to the wasteful

There are two ways to be rich: to have more or need less. It's estimated that we squander about 30 percent of our energy leaving the lights on, the refrigerator door open, and so on. Then there is the enormous amount of food that we expend huge amounts of energy to raise and then throw away.

It is true thrift to use the best ingredients available and to waste nothing.

I was born in London in England in 1934. I went through, as a child, the horrors of World War II, through a time when food was rationed and we learned to be very careful, and we never had more to eat than what we needed to eat. There was no waste. Everything was used.

When we unwrap presents, I tend to sit there with a bin liner trying to collect up the wrapping paper and thinking about which pieces I can reuse and which I will recycle.

The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn.

Simon Cowell is tight. That's why he's so successful - he's able to keep his money to himself.

My first rule of consumerism is never to buy anything you can't make your children carry.

I don't go to the sale rack. But I wouldn't say I am decadent in my spending. I am careful.

Nature uses as little as possible of anything.

The purpose - where I start - is the idea of use. It is not recycling, it's reuse.

I don't like to waste anything. Any food left over from the night before is always eaten the next day.

Thanks to my mother, not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago.

My mother was my biggest role model. She taught me to hate waste. We never wasted anything.

I have a company, and I've got to think about that. I'm trying to do my best there, and that's a much harder task. We recycle as much as possible, and we conserve. But I've always been one to save everything - I even walk up stairs on the very inside or the very outside to not wear out the tread.

We must subject the machine—technology—to control and cease despoiling the earth and filling people with goodies merely to make money.

People mean well. But there is an unintended consequence of giving people bigger recycling bins and more opportunities to recycle—soon they want to recycle everything.

I would think that conserving our natural resources should be a conservative position: Not to waste food, and not to throw away a lot of the food that we buy.

If you can't eat it, shoot it, or wear it, don't bring it.

I admit I'm a miser! The most generous thing I've done is get married!

What I learned being a young child was respect for food. Don't throw anything away.