Alice Walker Quotes

I feel humiliated that I live in a country that demands more already. Why do we cling to the notion that not only must we maintain the current level of consumption, but that it must continue to grow by an exponential factor of 2 to 7 percent every year?

Capitalism is destroying the world.

Regardless of what we consume, the sheer volume of consumption is overwhelming the Earth's living systems.

Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.

I think so much of neoliberalism and capitalism has caused people to live in a state of greed, fear and consumption that is covering up so much of what we really want.

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

I meant no harm I most truly did not, but I had to grow bigger so bigger I got. I biggered my factory, I biggered my roads, I biggered the wagons, I biggered the loads, of the Thneeds I shipped out I was shipping them forth from the South, to the East, to the West. To the North, I went right on biggering selling more thneeds. And I biggered my money which everyone needs.

Consuming three planets' worth of resources when in fact we have one is the environmental equivalent of childhood obesity - eating until you make yourself sick.

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.

Somewhere along the way to free-market capitalism, the United States became the most wasteful society on the planet.

Capitalism is an organized system to guarantee that greed becomes the primary force of our economic system and allows the few at the top to get very wealthy and has the rest of us riding around thinking we can be that way, too - if we just work hard enough, sell enough Tupperware and Amway products, we can get a pink Cadillac.

The market controls everything, but the market has no heart.

Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence.

There are many individuals, companies and even countries operating in what I call a 'me first' mentality, which is effectively a purely competitive approach to life, treating the planet as if it has infinite resources and pitting one country against another for supremacy.

The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm, capitalism is that kind of a system.

Nowadays the rage for possession has got to such a pitch that there is nothing in the realm of nature, whether sacred or profane, out of which profit cannot be squeezed.

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

The reality is that a consumer culture which chucks out its iPhones for a new version every nine months is completely unsustainable, because Earth has already reached the tipping point. 'The General Strike' attempts to personalize these issues and encourage listeners to look for a new model.

Combinations [large corporate conglomerates], governed entirely by the law of greed … threaten the integrity of our institutions.

Unfortunately, once an economy is geared to expansion, the means rapidly turn into an end and "the going becomes the goal.

Both the capitalist and state-socialist form of concentration and monopolization of economic power yield destructive forms of economic growth which contaminate and destroy the very basis of human and natural life.

The ideology and practice of individual acquisition, accumulation and concentration are now ascendant

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

The only trouble with capitalism is capitalists—they're too greedy.

… the spiritual emptiness and moral inadequacy of capitalism