Gunter Grass Quotes

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

If we take into account the existence of our planet, we have to recognise that we are guests that spend a short and very determined period in this world, and all we leave behind is nuclear waste.

Human society sustains itself by transforming nature into garbage.

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

I think all the garbage in the world is thanks to a very small handful of idiots.

Tearing down an old house and building a new one is the most wasteful thing we do as humans.

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

It feels like an easy sum to gauge the balance between forests and, say, the proliferating free newspapers that litter our public transport. This noxious combination of words and paper represents a clear-cut crime against the biosphere.

The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them.

I believe that the end of things man-made cannot be very far away - must be near at hand.

We can no longer throw our waste away because there is no away.

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

Sometimes I wake at 2 A.M. worrying that my great-granddaughter will have to march through her distant, broiling future gathering all the plastic I ever disposed of.

India's waste problem is gigantic, and with its economy growing steadily, it will be compounded manifold.

The waste products in Earth's crust are also the human in this expanded, spectral sense. One's garbage doesn't go 'away' - it just goes somewhere else.

For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil. And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born.

The whites, too, shall pass - perhaps sooner than other tribes. Continue to contaminate your bed and you will one night suffocate in your own waste.

All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm.

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.

The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.

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

From my travels around the world I have seen how much damage and pollution is done by the careless disposal of waste. It is also evident that we in the West produce far more and throw away far more than the developing world, almost without thinking

Thanks to my effort in the last 40 years, there has been more paper and film wasted.