Unsustainable Growth Quotes

As a community we have been living beyond our means…. We have been living at a rate which is simply not justified by the amounts of goods and services we are producing.

If something can’t go on forever, it will stop.

It's terrible to have to say this. World population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. This is so horrible to contemplate that we shouldn't even say it. But the general situation in which we are involved is lamentable.

Growth that adds volume without improving productivity is fat. Growth that diminishes productivity is cancer.

My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.

Of course I'm troubled by huge consumer debt levels - we've pushed consumer credit very hard in the US. Eventually, if it keeps growing, it will stop growing. As Herb Stein said, "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." When it stops, it may be unpleasant. Other than Herb Stein's quote, I have no comment. But the things that trouble you are troubling me.

America is in a runaway-train position and dragging all the world with it. It's grotesquely mentally ill.

A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived.

Rising inequality leads to less sustainable growth.

Government works less efficiently when it begins to grow out of control and takes on more and more of the responsibilities that belong to the citizens.

We’re turning everything on the planet into food for humans so we’re cutting down the rainforests, displacing all of the animals, and we’re doing all this to feed humans... ... Imagine if there were only 2 billion people polluting? We’re already overpopulated. I feel we’ve become a parasite on this planet. If this population keeps growing, we’ll just keep devouring the planet, and I don’t think it’s going to stand for that very long.

Mumbai is becoming more and more of a nightmare.

Development which has no regard for whom or what it harms is not development. It is the opposite of progress, damaging the Earth's capacity to support us and the rest of its living systems.

If your startup is only in the development or idea stage, there is almost no better predictor of failure - I mean, utter failure, scorched-earth bankruptcy - than raising too much money in the first round.

The current economic system is fundamentally flawed and inevitably destructive.

Success can breed all kinds of other behavior and cause companies to behave a certain way that isn't necessarily the ingredients for achieving more success. For instance, with success comes arrogance, and that's typically the death of success.

Stock market bubbles don't grow out of thin air. They have a solid basis in reality, but reality as distorted by a misconception.

We do not live in an economy, we live in a Ponzi scheme.

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth!

Park City is developing itself, almost to death.

For every Tesla or Uber, there's a Valeant Pharmaceuticals or Theranos - two story stocks that seduced an astounding array of prominent investors and supporters based on stories that did turn out to be too good to be true.

Handing money back to the private sector in tax cuts and starving the public sector is a formula for producing richer and richer consumers in filthier and filthier communities. If we stick to that formula we will end up in affluent misery.

The instruments of state prove too big to do the small things and too small to do the big things.

For every person in the world to reach the present U.S. level of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet earths.

Lack of outlets, excess capacity, complete deadlock, in the end regular recurrence of national bankruptcies and other disasters--perhaps world wars from sheer capitalist despair--may confidently be anticipated. History is as simple as that.