Quotes About Consumption

If a man had enough to eat, he'd want to grow a second mouth.' He also had a dirty way of saying it, but I won't repeat it here." Kat

The press could not help themselves. They attacked like ravenous relatives around a buffet table.

Short stories consume you faster. They're connected to brevity. With the short story, you are up against mortality. I know how tough they are as a form, but they're also a total joy.

A shift is necessary toward lifestyles less geared to environmental damaging consumption patterns.

A consumption tax, a national sales tax makes some sense. But I think that if we move towards a Fair Tax, if we move towards a national sales tax, we have to make sure that we do away with the income tax.

What the Obama administration's policies have really been oriented towards have always been towards providing benefits continuing consumption. What this country needs really is a policy which stresses investments.

The few pounds we spend for an item of clothing isn't the true cost - the real cost is the millions of gallons of clean water that was used to grow the fabric, or the millions of gallons of fresh water that was polluted with toxic chemicals to dye the clothes.

Drinking water that does not meet a federal health guideline will not necessarily make someone ill. Many contaminants are hazardous only if consumed for years. And some researchers argue that even toxic chemicals, when consumed at extremely low doses over long periods, pose few risks.

As the words of my book, 'The Bloodless Revolution,' accumulated, I envisaged a parallel growth: the stack of pages they would have to be printed on, thousands of times over; every page representing a slice of forest, a belch of fumes and a squirt of toxic ink.

GMOs are linked to digestive problems, among other things. Antibiotics and growth hormone are other additives being excessively pumped into the animals we are eating, which means we're then consuming these excess antibiotics and hormones. And some processed foods actually contain toxic chemicals, often used to prevent spoilage and enhance flavor.

Poor people don't drive the toxic form of economic 'growth' that is destroying our environment.

I really haven't been cognitive of gas prices. It wasn't until I filled up my husband's Toyota Prius Hybrid that I had a moment of understanding of how people who drive gas cars feel.

When we go to the store, we bring home more than food - we bring home traces of broader environmental problems. But we can use our shopping carts and dinner plates to help solve some of those problems.

The fact of the matter is that 40 years ago, unless you bought the record, you couldn't hear the music. It was such a narrow track in comparison to today.

Once food gets into our fridges, larders and kitchens, ensuring that it gets used up before going off seems like an obvious thing to do - but it's alarming how many millions of tonnes are simply chucked because we don't keep track of the food we've spent our money on.

I don't think people really do listen. We plug into music, and we have short attention spans. We tend to download individual tracks from iTunes rather than a whole album. We buy music DVDs and watch them once, and then they disappear into a drawer, or we loan them to a friend, and we never watch it again.

Nowadays, who actually listens to the tracks on an album, anyway?

Consider the perverse effect cap and trade has on altruistic actions. Say you decide to buy a small, high-efficiency car. That reduces your emissions, but not your country's. Instead it allows somebody else to buy a bigger S.U.V. - because the total emissions are set by the cap.

We have to change the kind of free trade deals we sign. We would have to change the absolutely central role of frenetic consumption in our culture. We would have to change the role of money in politics and our political system.

The whole world is determined by trade - which is really the blood of the world. The driving force is everyone's desire to have a better life. How? By consuming. For countries, the 'Holy Grail' is economic growth.

The human world lives in a framework called global economics. We live in a system based on GDP, which drives consumption. it causes people to compete with each other through trade in a way that they all grow.

Money flows into the US, and inflates US assets, and allows the US to have a monstrous trade deficit. That means we are consuming more than we are producing.

Once humans traded their hunter-gatherer existences for more settled communities, we began a quest to make our lives better and more comfortable, but we've also been sucking precious finite resources from our environment ever since.

In Marseilles they make half the toilet soap we consume in America, but the Marseillaise only have a vague theoretical idea of its use, which they have obtained from books of travel.