Overconsumption Quotes & Sayings

Overconsumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face today — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

McMansions in sprawling suburbs, without mountains of unnecessary packaging, without giant mechanized monofarms, without energy-hogging big-box stores, without electronic billboards, without endless piles of throwaway junk, without the overconsumption of consumer goods no one really needs is not an impoverished world. I disagree with those environmentalists who say we are going to have to make do with less. In fact, we are going to make do with more: more beauty, more community, more fulfillment, more art, more music, and material objects that are fewer in number but superior in utility and aesthetics. The cheap stuff that fills our lives today, however great its quantity, can only cheapen life. — Charles Eisenstein

And just so you know - that winter forest we walked into first? That was from Through the Looking Glass too. Hey, if you're going to saddle me with the blame for your overconsumption, at least get the book right. — Elle Lothlorien

All plenty which is not my God is poverty to me. — Saint Augustine

And I encourage you all to go shopping more — George W. Bush

American Christians spend more on dieting than on world missions.5 We spend more curing our overconsumption than we do feeding the physically and spiritually hungry of the world. — Tim Chester

Consumerism sees the consumption of ever more products and services as a positive thing. It encourages people to treat themselves, spoil themselves, and even kill themselves slowly by overconsumption. Frugality is a disease to be cured. — Yuval Noah Harari

The boom squanders through malinvestment scarce factors of production and reduces the stock available through overconsumption; its alleged blessings are paid for by impoverishment. — Ludwig Von Mises

We each make our solo voyages to deep, expansive waters. Alone in our contest with the wider world, we test our mettle and seek our trophies, promotions, compliments, and accolades. We strive to be needed and to thereby know that there is a reason for us. We seek to be told we are good because we're too unsure of ourselves to know. Yet often we remain so focused on our neediness that we forget the creatures - human and otherwise - we're drawing into the vortex of our own passion play. All of us have compulsive loves we must forbear. We forget to see that we can engage the world without harming it. And although we fish for approval, the challenge is: to capture our prizes while bringing more to the world than we take. — Carl Safina

Not what you possess but what you do with what you have, determines your true worth. — Thomas Carlyle

Human overconsumption is a greater problem than human population growth, and meat eating is a big part of that problem. — Sharon Gannon

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

He has much who needs least. Do not create necessities for yourself. — Josemaria Escriva

Overconsumption is a concern for people who've made it to regular consumption. I — Linda Tirado

Overconsumption is a "cancer eating away at our spiritual vitals." It cuts the heart right out of our compassion. It distances us from the great masses of broken bleeding humanity. It converts us into materialists. We become less able to ask moral questions. For example, just because we have the economic muscle to buy up vast amounts of the world's oil, does that give us the right to do so? When the poor farmer of India is unable to buy a gallon of gasoline to run his simple water pump because the world's demand has priced him out of the market, who is to blame? — Richard J. Foster

Many environmental threats in the twenty-first century will coincide with the dying out of the post-World War II baby boomers. Future historians may call them the fortunate generation. Their fortune was to have been born after the discovery of penicillin, to have lived in an age of selfish overconsumption of resources, and to have died before the oil ran out. — Bernard Goldstein

Should consumerism be the last thing we accomplish as a species, after all this evolution and the miraculous series of accidents that granted our sentience? Would that not be an utterly dull and inane end to our history? — Robert Wringham

First, it led to overconsumption, because of what he called the deception of the appetite-control apparatus by the density of the carbohydrates. — Gary Taubes