Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed.
~Mohandas K. Gandhi, quoted in E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful

Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites.
~William Ruckelshaus, Business Week, 18 June 1990

God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the west... keeping the world in chains. If [our nation] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.
~Mahatma Gandhi

U.S. consumers and industry dispose of enough aluminum to rebuild the commercial air fleet every three months; enough iron and steel to continuously supply all automakers; enough glass to fill New York's World Trade Center every two weeks.
~Environmental Defense Fund advertisement, Christian Science Monitor, 1990

Oh, for the good old days when people would stop Christmas shopping when they ran out of money.
~Author Unknown

Be glad that you're greedy; the national economy would collapse if you weren't.
~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

After a visit to the beach, it's hard to believe that we live in a material world.
~Pam Shaw

You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy.
~Eric Hoffer

You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need.
~Vernon Howard

The only reason a great many American families don't own an elephant is that they have never been offered an elephant for a dollar down and easy weekly payments.
~Mad Magazine

Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends.... Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.
~Henry David Thoreau

The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied... but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.
~John Berger

Racial injustice, war, urban blight, and environmental rape have a common denominator in our exploitative economic system.
~Channing E. Phillips, speech, Washington, D.C., 22 April 1970

To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year.
~Elwyn Brooks White

I may be a pessimist, but the philosophy of anti-thrift just now coming into being seems to me the greatest danger to the peace of the world.
~Adriano Tilgher

There must be more to life than having everything!
~Maurice Sendak

Mammon, n.: The god of the world's leading religion.
~Ambrose Bierce

Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.
~From the movie Fight Club, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk

He who buys what he does not need steals from himself.
~Author Unknown

Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.
~Unknown

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
~Edward Abbey

The hardest thing is to take less when you can get more.
~Kin Hubbard

In the United States Christmas has become the rape of an idea.
~Richard Bach

Forethought and temperance are the virtues which produced thrift, and with thrift the economic progress of society. And those are the virtues which today are gravely compromised.
~Adriano Tilgher

Who covets more, is evermore a slave.
~Robert Herrick

The gap in our economy is between what we have and what we think we ought to have - and that is a moral problem, not an economic one.
~Paul Heyne