Herman Melville Quotes

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

People who are greedy have extraordinary capacities for waste-they must, they take in too much.

The corruption of the American soul is consumerism.

Avarice has ruined more souls than extravagance.

The more we take the less we become, the fortune of one man means less for some.

It is better to take what does not belong to you than to let it lie around neglected.

Human society sustains itself by transforming nature into garbage.

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.

Modernity means overabundance. We are living in the age of mass-produced objects, things that come without announcing themselves and end up on our tables, on our walls. We use them - most of us don't even notice them - and then they vanish without fanfare.

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

Well, capitalism is a big problem, because with capitalism you're just going to keep buying and selling things until there's nothing else to buy and sell, which means gobbling up the planet.

… an avalanche of avarice

… a creed of greed

We as Americans have ripped off the world. We get to throw food away. It's insane.

The miser and the glutton are two facetious buzzards: one hides his store, and the other stores his hide.

Whenever we engage in consumption or production patterns which take more than we need, we are engaging in violence.

We don't have to be that greedy generation that just continued to take down the underpinnings of what makes the planet work in our favor.

We live in this culture of endless extraction and disposal: extraction from the earth, extraction from people's bodies, from communities, as if there's no limit, as if there's no consequence to how we're taking and disposing, and as if it can go on endlessly. We are reaching the breaking point on multiple levels. Communities are breaking, the planet is breaking, people's bodies are breaking. We are taking too much.

We, all of us in the First World, have participated in something of a binge, a half century of unbelievable prosperity and ease. We may have had some intuition that it was a binge and the earth couldn't support it, but aside from the easy things (biodegradable detergent, slightly smaller cars) we didn't do much. We didn't turn our lives around to prevent it. Our sadness is almost an aesthetic response - appropriate because we have marred a great, mad, profligate work of art, taken a hammer to the most perfectly proportioned of sculptures.

Our problem mostly in our abuse of each other and the planet is greed. Just the rampant, incredible greed that people have partly because they're empty and they can't get enough because they're - you know, it's that Buddhist thing about the hungry ghost with the little mouth and the big belly.

... man is eating the earth up like a candy bar.

One of the problems with industrialism is that it's based on the premise of more and more. It has to keep expanding to keep going. More and more television sets. More and more cars. More and more steel, and more and more pollution. We don't question whether we need any more or what we'll do with them. We just have to keep on making more and more if we are to keep going. Sooner or later it's going to collapse. ... Look what we have done already with the principle of more and more when it comes to nuclear weapons.

If the gatherer gathers too-much, Nature takes out of the man what she puts into his chest; swells the estate, but kills the owner. Nature hates, monopolies and exceptions.

We cannot agree that an act of plunder which threatens the livelihood of many nations should be allowed to succeed.

Greed puts out the sun.