Wasteful Quotes & Sayings

We forgive only that which requires forgiveness. To do otherwise is wasteful of grace.
Laniel, Abbot of Bilkar the Furred — Jordan MacLean

According to a recent report drafted by thirty-nine physicians from the Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) and endorsed by some 2,500 medical doctors, a movement to "a single payer system would trim administration, reduce incentives to over-treat, lower drug prices, minimize wasteful investments in redundant facilities, and eliminate almost all marketing and investor profits. These measures would yield the substantial savings needed to fund universal care and new investments in currently under-funded services and public health activities - without any net increase in national health spending." In — Bernie Sanders

Before they got vengeful, conservatives had some useful points to make about welfare. Government 'help' is too often guilt-assuaging gesture. It creates layers of wasteful bureaucracy. Too much help of the wrong sort creates a culture of dependency that swamps our ability to provide. — Donella Meadows

Too much action with too little intent makes for wasteful exertion of energy and the confusion between movement and progress. — Steve Maraboli

He was being mighty chary with my money. Now that I was so rich, I could fling open the windows and doors and set the thermostat on forty, if I wanted to do something so foolish and wasteful. — Charlaine Harris

Now, so, if you want to blame someone for wasteful spending, the Republicans are in the majority. — Chaka Fattah

The word which gives the key to the national vice is waste. And people who are wasteful are not wise, neither can they remain young and vigorous. In order to transmute energy to higher and more subtle levels one must first conserve it. — Henry Miller

Everyone will tell you your goal is impossible, pointless, stupid, wasteful. So you hang tough. You back yourslef and only yourself. — Tim Winton

The direction of research . . .should be:
- toward non-violence rather than violence,
- towards a harmonious cooperation with nature rather than with warfare against nature;
- towards the noiseless, low-energy, elegant, and economical solutions normally applied in nature rather than [our often] noisy, high-energy, brutal, wasteful, and clumsy solutions. — E.F. Schumacher

A wasteful defense is a weak defense. — Ralph Nader

You will find no one willing to share out his money; but to how many does each of us divide up his life! People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy. — Seneca.

Diversity, not uniformity, is what works. Our problem is not that people are living a bad way but rather that they're all living the same way. The earth can accommodate many people living in a voraciously wasteful and pollutive way, it just can't accommodate all of us living that way. — Daniel Quinn

The Concord Coalition in Virginia complained about pork projects and wasteful spending in the federal budget. Consider the Senate chaplain's salary. As occupations go, only mind readers in Los Angeles have fewer things to do all day. — Argus Hamilton

Like many businessmen of genius he learned that free competition was wasteful, monopoly efficient. And so he simply set about achieving that efficient monopoly. — Mario Puzo

It is dangerous and harmful to be guided in our life's course by hatreds and aversions, for they are wasteful of energy and limit and twist the mind and prevent it from perceiving the truth. — Jawaharlal Nehru

If we can find ways to love life and be joyful without being wasteful or destructive
that's what's important. — Natalie Portman

The diseconomies of capitalism are treated as the public's responsibility. Corporate America skims the cream and leaves the bill for us to pay, then boasts about how productive and efficient it is and complains about our wasteful government. — Michael Parenti

A government decision that slashes spending at the wrong time and sends a weak economy into a tailspin can be just as undisciplined as one that unleashes a wasteful spending spree in an overheated environment. — Peter Blair Henry

When people love each other, they are content with very little. When we have light and joy in our hearts, we don't need material wealth. The most loving communities are often the poorest. If our own life is luxurious and wasteful, we can't approach poor people. If we love people, we want to identify with them and share with them. — Jean Vanier

It frequently happens that an element of the standard of living which set out with being primarily wasteful, ends with becoming, in the apprehension of the consumer, a necessary of life. — Thorstein Veblen

When we over consume the Earth's resources, we create an economic imbalance in societies and in the world. Affluent people and affluent societies can afford to buy everything in large quantities. They have an abundance of wealth and think they have the license to waste. They use a great deal and leave others with very little. It is this imbalance between rich and poor that gives rise to crime, violence, prejudice, and other negative attitudes.

When some people cannot get what they need through honest hard work, and see others wasting what is so precious, they feel justified in taking it by force. The Earth can only produce enough for everyone's need, but not for everyone's greed. Our greed and wasteful habits perpetuate poverty, which is violence against humanity. — Arun Gandhi

Instead of cutting waste, the Obama Administration is hurting workers. President Obama should stop protecting wasteful government spending. — Timothy Griffin

How many
Pieces
Of bread
Separate
These words:
Needy,
Fine,
Wasteful? — Matthew Quick

Our efforts in chess attain only a hundredth of one percent of their rightful result ... Our education, in all domains of endeavour, is frightfully wasteful of time and values. — Emanuel Lasker

Funeral expenses are the curse of the poor everywhere on earth, they are wasteful and unnecessary, they are the price of foolish ostentation and a display that is less an evidence of grief than a vulgar travesty of those pompous obsequies where no grief is. — Joyce Cary

Gluttony is wrong. It's wasteful. — Alton Brown

To truly cherish the things that are important to you, you must first discard those that have outlived their purpose. And if you no longer need them, then that is neither wasteful nor shameful. Can you truthfully say that you treasure something buried so deeply in a cupboard or drawer that you have forgotten its existence? — Marie Kondo

Page: Don't keep the world on tenterhooks, Tom! Out with it! What's the best thing we can do to ensure a long, happy, healthy future for mankind?
Grey: We can just about restore the balance of the ecology, the biosphere, and so on-in other words we can live within our means instead of on an unrepayable overdraft, as we've been doing for the past half century-if we exterminate the two hundred million most extravagant and wasteful of our species.
Page: Follow that if you can, Mr. President. — John Brunner

It's not leftovers that are wasteful, but those who either don't know what to do with them or can't be bothered. — Julian Baggini

People were tired of wasteful government programs and welfare chiselers; and they were angry about the constant spiral of taxes and government regulations, arrogant bureaucrats, and public officials who thought all of mankind's problems could be solved by throwing the taxpayers' dollars at them. — Ronald Reagan

Scott goes to the computer and loads a chart that says something about global warming. Scott says, "See?" Judy says, "I don't think global warming is important, people shouldn't need to use global warming as an excuse to stop being wasteful." Scott says, "How can you not believe this?" Judy says, "There has been golf ball-sized hail storms and hurricanes for a long time, it didn't just start all of the sudden. In the movie Al Gore drives in an SUV." Scott leaves to have a cigarette. Cory says, "Al Gore owns his own farm." Judy stares at the TV. Judy thinks, "No one in this room cares about global warming, this is ridiculous, we are all smoking cigarettes and eating cheese, how can any one of us care about voting? No one in this room cares about anything. — Ellen Kennedy

Unaimed opulence, in general, is a roundabout, undependable, and wasteful way of improving the living standards of the poor. — Amartya Sen

The universe is an emanation of mind. As human consciousness evolves in an accelerated spiral, we are being compelled to realize that our minds are manifesting reality to an ever-increasing extent- our collective shadow-projections of wasteful technologies, wars, and weaponry reflect subtler interior regions of our psyche and the discordant deceptions in our intimate relationships. If this interpretation is valid, it forces upon us a concomitant responsibility, a grave burden. — Daniel Pinchbeck

The single most wasteful thing you can do in marketing is try to change a mind. — Al Ries

Many governments are giving subsidies to fossil fuel production and consumption that encourage greenhouse gas emissions, at the same time as they are spending on projects to promote clean energy. This is a wasteful use of scarce budget resources. — Jose Angel Gurria

It looks perverted and wasteful to us, but then one thing that empires are not about is the efficient use of resources and the spread of happiness; both are typically accomplished despite the economic short-circuiting - corruption and favoritism, mostly - endemic to the system. — Iain Banks

-I know there were wars in my time, but none so wasteful as this.

-War is always wasteful. — Sasha Summers

Our biggest art forms are film and television, and there hasn't been a great film about 9/11 yet, nor has there been a great television series. Something like The Wire gives us a rich and fully achieved picture of the wasteful, cruel War on Drugs; something like The White Ribbon gives a perspective on World War I that could only have been presented long after the event itself. — Teju Cole

Computers are wasteful of paper and time. Once, we'd get documents with a few errors. Now, people make hundreds of copies until each sheet is flawless and memos are duplicated endlessly. Managers get swamped with emails. — Felix Dennis

Daily experience proves clearly to everybody but the most bigoted fanatics of socialism that governmental management is inefficient and wasteful. — Ludwig Von Mises

Conservatives should question how the death penalty actually works in order to stay true to small government, reduction in wasteful spending, and respect for human life. — Jay Sekulow

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

Ah, wasteful woman, she who may
On her sweet self set her own price,
Knowing man cannot choose but pay,
How has she cheapened paradise;
How given for nought her priceless gift,
How spoiled the bread and spilled the wine,
Which, spent with due respective thrift,
Had made brutes men and men divine. — Coventry Patmore

Simplicity in its essence demands neither a vow of poverty nor a life of rural homesteading. As an ethic of self-conscious material moderation, it can be practiced in cities and suburbs, townhouses and condominiums. It requires neither a log cabin nor a hairshirt but a deliberate ordering of priorities so as to distinguish between the necessary and superfluous, useful and wasteful, beautiful and vulgar. — David Shi

It's simple. Mankind is a sorry excuse for living creatures. They are cruel, cold, merciless, selfish, heartless, wasteful, greedy, and destructive. But the list goes on. I can spend all night telling you what's wrong with them, but why bother? — Charles Lee

The '90s were a time of building for me. Building a life that was sober, drained of harmful, wasteful excess and manufacturing in its place a family of my own. — Rob Lowe

Rent control, however, encourages wasteful use of space. — Henry Hazlitt

The way we use technology is completely wasteful. We duplicate many vacuum cleaners, tools; In the future we will make the best of equipment and make it available to everyone. — Jacque Fresco

I went through all my electric bills, the water bills, the phone bills, elevator contracts, and I found enough wasteful spending without reducing any programs anywhere, without reducing any services, I found enough wasteful spending to pay my entire salary for three years. — Thomas Massie

I'm not going to stop beating up on the Democrats for wasteful spending. — Nikki Haley

While the ACA's insurance expansions and reforms represent a great leap forward for the U.S., it is also true that when fully implemented by 2018, the U.S. will still have the most inefficient, wasteful, and unfair health insurance system of any advanced nation, even with the ACA reforms. — John E. McDonough

Life does not require us to be consistent, cruel, patient, helpful, angry, rational, thoughtless, loving, rash, open-minded, neurotic, careful, rigid, tolerant, wasteful, rich, downtrodden, gentle, sick, considerate, funny, stupid, healthy, greedy, beautiful, lazy, responsive, foolish, sharing, pressured, intimate, hedonistic, industrious, manipulative, insightful, capricious, wise, selfish, kind or sacrificed. Life does, however, require us to live with the consequences of our choices. — Richard Bach

A man's labor is not only his capital but his life. When it passes it returns never more. To utilize it, to prevent its wasteful squandering, to enable the poor man to bank it up for use hereafter, this surely is one of the most urgent tasks before civilization. — William Booth

When what one does, reps, or 'spits', repetitively, is foul or beastly - one summons spiritual undertakers to dine on fleshly parasites. In various forms, nature's law purges all that becomes wasteful. Change your game, or the game will change you. — T.F. Hodge

Of all means to regeneration, Remorse is surely the most wasteful. — E. M. Forster

We must act now and wake up to our moral obligations. The poor and vulnerable are members of God's family and are the most severely affected by droughts, high temperatures, the flooding of coastal cities, and more severe and unpredictable weather events resulting from climate change. We, who should have been responsible stewards preserving our vulnerable, fragile planet home, have been wantonly wasteful through our reckless consumerism, devouring irreplaceable natural resources. — Desmond Tutu

Only the wasteful virtues earn the sun ... — William Butler Yeats

Liberty and security!" he cried, waving his arm again. "Is that not what it comes down to? You see, I know the argument already! I know the form of it! Liberty over security, security over liberty ... provision from the father, freedom for the son. Of course the father might be too controlling - that can happen - and the son might be wasteful ... prodigal ... but it's the same quarrel, every time. Lovers too," he added, when Moody did not interject. "It's the same for lovers, too: at bottom, always, the same dispute. — Eleanor Catton

To get rid of what you no longer need is neither wasteful nor shameful. Can you truthfully say that you treasure something buried so deeply in a closet or drawer that you have forgotten its existence? If things had feelings, they would certainly not be happy. Free them from the prison to which you have relegated them. — Marie Kondo

The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less wasteful. — Wendell Berry

Energy is significantly underpriced in many parts of the world, leading to wasteful consumption, price volatility and fuel smuggling. It's also undermining the competitiveness of renewables. — Fatih Birol

The most wasteful "brain drain" in America today is the drain in the kitchen sink. — Elizabeth Gould Davis

Protectionism is a misnomer. The only people protected by tariffs, quotas and trade restrictions are those engaged in uneconomic and wasteful activity. Free trade is the only philosophy compatible with international peace and prosperity. — Walter Block

February ... Now more than ever one must remind oneself that it is wasteful folly to wish that time would pass, or - as the puritanical old saying used to have it - to kill time until it kills you. — Joseph Wood Krutch

We might hope to change the world through better, bigger programs to stop global warming, but global warming will not end unless people become less greedy and less wasteful, gaining a fresh vision of what it means to love our global neighbor. — Shane Claiborne

working more than 40 hours a week was stupid, wasteful, dangerous, and expensive - and the most telling sign of dangerously incompetent management to boot," Robinson writes. Further, more than a hundred years of research shows that "every hour you work over 40 hours a week is making you less effective and productive over both the short and the long haul." Really! Even though most people think this makes intuitive sense, they are still surprised to hear that it is actually true. This common sense is so widely ignored that overwork - and the problems with health, happiness, and productivity that it brings - is epidemic. — Christine Carter

In the west, Apollo and Dionysus strive for victory. Apollo makes the boundary lines that are civilization but that lead to convention, constraint, oppression. Dionysus is energy unbound, mad, callous, destructive, wasteful. Apollo is law, history, tradition, the dignity and safety of custom and form. Dionysus is the new, exhilarating but rude, sweeping all away to begin again. Apollo is a tyrant, Dionysus is a vandal. — Camille Paglia

Make no mistake: I will work with both Democrats and Republicans to cut wasteful spending and reduce our debt in a balanced, responsible way. — Ann McLane Kuster

She saw it over and over again in her male patients, she said - it could probably qualify as an epidemic among American men: this stubborn reluctance to embrace our wholeness - this stoic denial that we had come from our mothers as well as our fathers. It was sad, really - tragic. So wasteful of human lives, as our wars and drive-by shootings kept proving to us; all one had to do was turn on CNN or CBS News. And yet, it was comic, too - the lengths most men went to to prove that they were tough guys. — Wally Lamb

Everything is deeply affected by the dominant culture. Consumerism is huge in the US. This is by far the wealthiest [nation], but also the biggest consumer in the world. Which means that a lot of things get used, a lot of things get wasted, and a lot of things get churned out in ways that are wasteful. — Wangechi Mutu

Economic analysis is the first principle of Marxism. Professors who were genuine leftists would have challenged the entire economics-driven machinery of American academe the wasteful multidepartmental structure, the divisive pedantry of overspecialization, the cronyism and sycophancy in recruitment and promotion, the boondoggling ostentation of pointless conferences, the exploitation of graduate students and part-time teachers, the subservience of faculty to overpaid administrators, the mediocrity and folly of the ruling cliques of the Modern Language Association. — Camille Paglia

Every effort needs to be made to try and offset the costs of Katrina and Rita by reductions in other government programs, especially those that are wasteful, duplicative and ineffective. — Ben Bernanke

This guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. People's speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed. Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark. The growing piles of ashes and cinders in the back yards were the only evidence that the wasteful, consuming process of life went on at all. — Willa Cather

Avoid a wasteful life and make each unit of time count — Sunday Adelaja

I don't live beyond my means. I enjoy luxury and I enjoy the privilege of it, when I can afford it, and I'm in the situation where it's been given to me, but I'm very conscious of what is wasteful. — Benedict Cumberbatch

Whenever it is necessary that one of several conflicting opinions should prevail and when one would have to be made to prevail by force if need be, it is less wasteful to determine which has the stronger support by counting numbers than by fighting. — Friedrich August Von Hayek

Don't waste time. Avoid the company of wasteful people who lack the desire to achieve. Become assertive and action-oriented. — Archibald Marwizi

If I could tell the world just one thing
It would be that we're all OK
And not to worry 'cause worry is wasteful
And useless in times like these
I won't be made useless
I won't be idle with despair
I will gather myself around my faith
For light does the darkness most fear
My hands are small, I know
But they're not yours, they are my own
But they're not yours, they are my own
And I am never broken — Jewel

All things are cheap to the saving, dear to the wasteful — Benjamin Franklin

None of this means anything. Anything of significance, that is. I am just amusing myself, musing, losing myself in a welter of words. For words in here are a form of luxury, of sensuousness, they are all we have been allowed to keep of the rich, wasteful world from which we are shut away. — John Banville

Round a turn of the Qin Fortress winds the Wei River,
And Yellow Mountain foot-hills enclose the Court of China;
Past the South Gate willows comes the Car of Many Bells
On the upper Palace-Garden Road-a solid length of blossom;
A Forbidden City roof holds two phoenixes in cloud;
The foliage of spring shelters multitudes from rain;
And now, when the heavens are propitious for action,
Here is our Emperor ready-no wasteful wanderer. — Wang Wei

Claire to Myrnin: "Do the guards at the mall know you're out?" He didn't look up. "That's very doubtful, I did kill the guard who spotted me, after all." They all stopped what they were doing and Shane snapped around and took a step toward him.
"Would that be the dead guard in our damn basement?"
"Well, of course, how many dead guards could there be? Why, did you kill one, too? Wasteful. — Rachel Caine

Ah, Hah! But you see, Baron, I know as a Mentat when you will send the executioner. You will hold back just so long as I am useful. To move sooner would be wasteful and I'm yet of much use. I know what it is you learned from that lovely Dune planet - waste not? True, Baron?
-Piter De Vries — Frank Herbert

100 years ago, buying something you could make was considered wasteful; now making something you could buy is considered wasteful. I am not convinced this is a step in the right direction. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be. — Steven Pinker

Sharks have swum the oceans for over 400 million years, but we're threatening this critically important species for the purpose of making soup - it's sad and wasteful. — Ted Danson

It is possible to conceive conflict as not necessarily a wasteful outbreak of incompatibilities, but a normal process by which socially valuable differences register themselves for the enrichment of all concerned. — Mary Parker Follett

Government spending either is completely wasteful, merely transfers income, purchases an intermediate rather than a final good, or purchases valuable final services whose value cannot be ascertained because the transaction is not made by private parties exchanging their own resources in a market setting. — Robert Higgs

To me war is something to be outgrown, recognized as immature, wasteful, and so destructive to life that human beings should shun it ... as they once shunned bubonic plague. — Alice Walker

One day employers will need to incentivize employees to actually work in an office. The office, in many ways, is obsolete. The office is more and more becoming a place for wasteful meetings and the work is actually being done at home. A Results-Only-Work-Environment (ROWE) is the path of future location-independent businesses. — Richie Norton

Have you found your life distasteful?
My life did and does smack sweet.
Was your youth of pleasure wasteful?
Mine I save and hold complete.
Do your joys with age diminish?
When mine fail me, I'll complain.
Must in death your daylight finish?
My sun sets to rise again. — Robert Browning

The most disturbing and wasteful emotions in modern life, next to fright, are those which are associated with the idea of blame, directed against the self or against others. — Marilyn Ferguson

To respect law, a man carries mercy with his endeavours. To respect ethics, he moves on wasteful relationships. — Harshit Walia

The fantastically wasteful prodigality of human tongues, the Babel enigman, points to a vital multiplication of mortal liberties. Each language speaks the world in its own ways. Each edifies worlds and counter-worlds in its own mode. The polyglot is a freer man. — George Steiner

This is historically what happens whenever revolutionaries begin to take the oppression and suffering of their fellow beings seriously, whether human or nonhuman. It's regrettable that certain scientists are willing to put their families at risk by choosing to do wasteful animal experiments in this day and age. — Jerry Vlasak

How skillful to tax the middle class to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top of humiliation! How adroit to bus poor black youngsters into poor white neighborhoods, in a violent exchange of impoverished schools, while the schools of the rich remain untouched and the wealth of the nation, doled out carefully where children need free milk, is drained for billion-dollar aircraft carriers. How ingenious to meet the demands of blacks and women for equality by giving them small special benefits, and setting them in competition with everyone else for jobs made scares by an irrational, wasteful system. How wise to turn the fear and anger of the majority toward a class of criminals bred - by economic inequity - faster than they can be put away, deflecting attention from the huge thefts of national resources carried out within the law by men in executive offices. — Howard Zinn

Therefore, to be possess'd with double pomp, To guard a title that was rich before, To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, To throw a perfume on the violet, To smooth the ice, or add another hue Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish, Is wasteful and ridiculous excess. — William Shakespeare

Those with health insurance are overinsured and their behavior is distorted by moral hazard. Those without health insurance use their own money to make decisions based on an assessment of
their needs. The insured are wasteful. The uninsured are prudent. So what's the solution? Make the insured a little more like the uninsured. — Malcolm Gladwell

Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer. — Norman Mailer

Government is wasteful, fraudulent, and abusive by its very nature. To get rid of waste, fraud, and abuse, government power has to be dealt with. Government's legitimacy has to be challenged. Its claims of success must be refuted. The people who desire peace and prosperity must accept the fact that government and the politicians never deliver peace or prosperity. — Ron Paul