Quotes About Growth

So while we cannot be godly without the practice of the Disciplines, we can practice the Disciplines without being godly if we see them as ends and not means.

The best leaders never stop learning.

It doesn`t hurt to get more education.

Watch, listen, and learn. You can't know it all yourself. Anyone who thinks they do is destined for mediocrity.

success comes from failure, not from memorizing the right answers.

Reading changes your life. Reading unlocks worlds unknown or forgotten, taking travelers around the world and through time. Reading helps you escape the confines of school and pursue your own education. Through characters – the saints and the sinners, real or imagined – reading shows you how to be a better human being.

The idea that there might be limits to growth is for many people impossible to imagine. Limits are politically unmentionable and economically unthinkable. The culture tends to deny the possibility of limits by placing a profound faith in the powers of technology, the workings of a free market, and the growth of the economy as the solution to all problems, even the problems created by growth.

In physical, exponentially growing systems, there must be at least one reinforcing loop driving the growth and at least one balancing loop constraining the growth, because no physical system can grow forever in a finite environment.

The model is constructed in such a way that the global population will eventually level off and start declining, if industrial output per capita rises high enough. But we see little "real world" evidence that the richest people or nations ever lose interest in getting richer. Therefore, policies built into World3 represent the assumption that capital owners will continue to seek gains in their wealth indefinitely and that consumers will always want to increase their consumption.

There always will be limits to growth. They can be self-imposed. If they aren't, they will be system-imposed.

A quantity growing exponentially toward a constraint or limit reaches that limit in a surprisingly short time.

If current predictions of population growth prove accurate and patterns of human activity on the planet remain unchanged, science and technology may not be able to prevent either irreversible degradation of the environment or continued poverty for much of the world. —ROYAL SOCIETY OF LONDON AND U.S. NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, 1992

The more output that is produced, the more can be invested to make new capital. This is a reinforcing loop, like the birth loop for a population. The investment fraction is equivalent to the fertility. The greater the fraction of its output a society invests, the faster its capital stock will grow.

The central question of economic development is how to keep the reinforcing loop of capital accumulation from growing more slowly than the reinforcing loop of population growth—so that people are getting richer instead of poorer.

If an eventual nine billion people all consumed materials at the rate of the average late-twentieth-century American, that would require an increase in worldwide steel production by a factor of five, copper by a factor of eight, and aluminum by a factor of nine.

Growth of what? For whom? At what cost? Paid by whom? What is the real need here, and what is the most direct and efficient way for those who have that need to satisfy it? How much is enough? What are the obligations to share?

Because we bump into reinforcing loops so often, it is handy to know this shortcut: The time it takes for an exponentially growing stock to double in size, the "doubling time," equals approximately 70 divided by the growth rate (expressed as a percentage). Example: If you put $100 in the bank at 7% interest per year, you will double your money in 10 years (70 ÷ 7 = 10). If you get only 5% interest, your money will take 14 years to double.

The tragedy of the commons arises from missing (or too long delayed) feedback from the resource to the growth of the users of that resource.

Understanding layers of limits and keeping an eye on the next upcoming limiting factor is not a recipe for perpetual growth, however. For any physical entity in a finite environment, perpetual growth is impossible. Ultimately, the choice is not to grow forever but to decide what limits to live within.

Focus on what's ahead. Use what is behind.

It takes a man a while to get his head around the fact that"—she pinched her lips in thought, then nodded—"love makes you stronger, not weaker." She turned to her big brother. "Is that right, Simon?" "Yes, that's right.

You're not born with a walk like that. You have to earn it.

you have to come of age when it's your time. If you try to rush it or put it off, it only gets you into trouble.

Rather, we can regularly ask ourselves these questions: Who am I becoming through this practice? Am I becoming the world in which I wish to live?