Unsustainable Quotes

#1. Yet, despite our many advances, our environment is still threatened by a range of problems, including global climate change, energy dependence on unsustainable fossil fuels, and loss of biodiversity.

Dan Lipinski

#2. For a consumer society thrives by stoking unquenchable desires into unsustainable cravings and fanning them with an inflated rage for rights. The restlessness it creates by providing false satisfactions and deadening true desires simultaneously fuels the economy and destroys happiness.

Os Guinness

#3. Economic growth without investment in human development is unsustainable - and unethical

Amartya Sen

#4. What we miss is how unsustainable that is. Even bigger is the idea that we as a nation are not made up of businesses, banks, malls, markets, homes or things. Our greatest asset is ourselves: our lives and our people. The real investment should be there.

Brian Ulrich

#5. While growth may be unsustainable, de-growth is unstable.' Today's economic model cannot continue indefinitely. We live on a small planet. The population and the economy are growing, but the planet is not growing.

Anders Wijkman

#6. I usually work seven days a week and rarely take vacations, which is both lame and unsustainable. I don't mind the idea of writing seven days a week, I suppose. Getting some work done early in the morning. But ideally I would love to take one day a week off.

Brad Listi

#7. Today the great gift of God's Creation is exposed to serious dangers and lifestyles which can degrade it. Environmental pollution is making particularly unsustainable the lives of the poor of the world ... we must pledge ourselves to take care of creation and to share its resources in solidarity.

Pope Benedict XVI

#8. Most of us are living at a pace that is not only unsustainable; it's also unbiblical.

Craig Groeschel

#9. Over time, the welfare state has become dysfunctional in a surprising way. But in a way it became a victim of its own success: It became so successful at prolonging life, that it becomes financially unsustainable, unless you make major changes to things like retirement ages.

Niall Ferguson

#10. For too long we have placed an irrational burden upon our oceans by demanding only a narrow selection of species, which has led to unsustainable fishing and economic practices. If we instead ask the ocean what it is willing to supply, we engage in an inherently more sustainable relationship.

Barton Seaver

#11. A flat-rate poll tax would be politically unsustainable; even with a rebate scheme, the package would have an unacceptable impact on certain types of household.

Nigel Lawson

#12. It's incredibly important that if you have the dream of having your own house, you don't pretend to be something you're not. Ultimately, it's unsustainable and people will see through. You have to work; you can't expect your dreams to be handed to you on a plate.

Stella McCartney

#13. The signs have been everywhere. The changing temperatures. The rising tides. The melting glaciers. Deforestation, pollution, and voracious, unsustainable consumption. We are killing our home.

B.C. Chase

#14. President Obama has admitted that Medicare is on an unsustainable course and that no amount of tax increases can fix it.

David Limbaugh

#15. Everything in life is us trying to reproduce that first moment. That frenzy of unsustainable energy exploding into a billion directions.

Peter Tieryas

#16. The essence of the problem is about consumption, recognizing that a society that consumes one-third of the world's resources is unsustainable. This level of consumption requires constant intervention into other people's lands. That's what's going on.

Winona LaDuke

#17. In Greece, Italy and, to a lesser extent, France, unsustainable tax cuts and spending sprees added to households' estimates of their private wealth relative to their wage income.

Edmund Phelps

#18. Why are fish unsustainable? Because they're popular. What makes restaurants work? Popular dishes that people come back for.

Barton Seaver

#19. We need what I have often called an ecological approach to the management of these resources and we do not have that now. We have the inertia of past habits, unsustainable habits.

Maurice Strong

#20. One always returns to the fact that there are just too many of us, the population continues to rise and it's unsustainable

Jeremy Irons

#21. In California, there are huge problems because of dams. I'm against big dams, per se, because I think that they are economically unfeasible. They're ecologically unsustainable. And they're hugely undemocratic.

Arundhati Roy

#22. Social Security is unsustainable because it is not meeting the first order condition of a Ponzi scheme, namely expanding the pool of suckers.

Walter E. Williams

#23. Something that's unsustainable, like a dysfunctional relationship, can go on longer than you expect, and then end faster and messier than you think.

Peter R. Orszag

#24. The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century's frontier.

Bruce Sterling

#25. Unsustainable situations usually go on longer than most economists think possible. But they always end, and when they do, it's often painful.

Paul Krugman

#26. Climate change is the world's greatest environmental challenge. It is now plain that the emission of greenhouse gases, associated with industrialization and economic growth ... is causing global warming at a rate that is unsustainable.

Tony Blair

#27. If we pass on an unsustainable environment to our children we have failed them.

Lewis Gordon

#28. The gains made by better management and technology are still being outpaced by the environmental impacts of population and economic growth. We are on an unsustainable course.

Klaus Topfer

#29. We have serious challenges regarding climate change, unsustainable use of natural resources, water scarcity, loss of biodiversity, forests and farmland. Not to mention the huge inequality still prevailing in several parts of the planet.

Guilherme Leal

#30. Humanity's current demand for energy is fundamentally unsustainable. The only feasible choice is to conduct a massive downscaling of all economic, industrial, and political operations. A decentralized, autonomous, and locally-based energy infrastructure is ultimately the only sustainable option.

Stacy Pettigrew

#31. To achieve a more balanced international system over time, countries with excessive and unsustainable trade surpluses will need to allow their exchange rates to better reflect market fundamentals.

Ben Bernanke

#32. Unsustainable energy consumption has humanity locked into a death spiral with nature.

Steven Magee

#33. What if capitalism is unsustainable, and socialism is impossible?

Ken MacLeod

#34. Pushing yourself to be the best is unsustainable. Simply push yourself to be better than the day before.

Simon Sinek

#35. The reality is that a consumer culture which chucks out its iPhones for a new version every nine months is completely unsustainable, because Earth has already reached the tipping point. 'The General Strike' attempts to personalize these issues and encourage listeners to look for a new model.

Justin Sane

#36. The frontiers of the future will be the ruins of the unsustainable.

Bruce Sterling

#37. Treatment without prevention is simply unsustainable.

Bill Gates

#38. Devastation could arise insidiously, rather than suddenly, through unsustainable pressure on energy supplies, food, water and other natural resources. Indeed, these pressures are the prime 'threats without enemies' that confront us.

Martin Rees

#39. Simply put, unsustainable debt is helping to keep too many poor countries and poor people in poverty.

William J. Clinton

#40. China's building binge is the most striking example of what Prime Minister Wen Jiabao famously, but impotently, denounced in 2007 as the country's "unbalanced, unstable, uncoordinated and unsustainable" model of economic development.

Rosemary Righter

#41. The world that you and I live in is increasingly challenged. Population growth, pollution, over-consumption, unsustainable patterns, social conflict, climate change, loss of nature ... these are not good stories.

Jack Dangermond

#42. The communist model does not work economically, we all realised that, but the capitalist model in the modern world also looks to be unsustainable.

Arsene Wenger

#43. I ran for Congress not because I was having a mid-life crisis. I left the private sector because I saw a looming financial crisis that was coming to this country. It's unsustainable.

Steve Daines

#44. President Obama has ignored or dismissed proposals that would address our anti-competitive tax code and unsustainable trajectory of federal debt - including his own bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform - and submitted no plan for entitlement reform.

Glenn Hubbard

#45. How I changed my mind about women in leadership came through the gradual piling up of anomalies against a powerful but unsustainable paradigm.

Alan F. Johnson

#46. Experience shows that when political governance and economic management diverge, overall development becomes unsustainable.

Mo Ibrahim

#47. Tyranny is increasingly unsustainable in this post-cold-war era. It is doomed to failure. But it must be prodded to exit the stage with a whimper - not the bang that extremists long for.

Eskinder Nega

#48. We have a government that borrows $4 billion a day. We have a government that owes trillions of dollars in debt, half of that to foreigners, most of that to Chinese investors. I don't - that is extreme. Not only is it extreme. It's insane and it's unsustainable.

Marco Rubio

#49. People of my generation knew we needed to move beyond that, the racial division and segregation and unsustainable social relations, that were unfair to millions of people. But it didn't mean that we were going to become a big government liberal.

Jeff Sessions

#50. The brutal reality is that newer, more sprawling suburbs - and especially the cheap boom-years exburbs - aren't just a bit unsustainable, they're ruinously unsustainable in almost every way, and nothing we know of will likely stop their decline, much less fix them easily.

Alex Steffen

#51. An environment of infinite economic expansion is unsustainable in a world of finite resources.

Bryant McGill

#52. If you believe that health care is a public good to be guaranteed by the state, then a single-payer system is the next best alternative. Unfortunately, it is fiscally unsustainable without rationing.

Charles Krauthammer

#53. Growth based on debt is unsustainable, artificial.

Jose Manuel Barroso

#54. If we are going to make the change from community to communitas, and not just end up with an unsustainable adrenaline-junkie culture, we must have a sophisticated process to form people into adventurer-disciples.

Alan Hirsch

#55. Recession-resistant development produces things people need. Unsustainable growth churns out tinsel products that consumers have to be seduced into buying - until times get tough, when they quickly give them up.

Donella Meadows

#56. There are no good futures. There's nothing to head towards but more garish, unsustainable carnival acts.

Warren Ellis

#57. The key to successful change is sensitivity towards that which is indigenous and, in the long run, diversity will always be more resilient than monoculture despite the current unsustainable trends in the opposite direction.

Jonathan Watts

#58. Being a high school teacher was wonderful, but unsustainable: I needed a way out.

Garth Greenwell

#59. First, the year 2004, the year past, the Comptroller General of the United States, David A. Walker, said that arguably it was the worst year in American fiscal history, clearly setting our Nation on an unsustainable path.

Jim Cooper

#60. The mythology of the Reagan presidency is that he induced the collapse of the Soviet Union by luring it into unsustainable military spending and wars: should there come a point when we think about applying that lesson to ourselves?

Glenn Greenwald

#61. But spending your life pretending you are something other than what you are is unsustainable.

Megyn Kelly

#62. The only reason for a government service is precisely to provide financial support for an operation that is otherwise unsustainable, or else there would be no point in the government's involvement at all.

Llewellyn Rockwell

#63. In any society built on institutionalized racism, race-mixing doesn't merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent.

Trevor Noah

#64. Now and always, hard-line policy and those who embrace it are vessels for darker forces that are at once self-cannibalizing and combustible. No good can come of them. They are unsustainable because their sense of righteousness denies human worth.

Queen Rania Of Jordan

#65. Another world is possible!' ... Another world is also necessary, for this one is unjust, unsustainable, and unsafe. It's up to us to envision, fight for, and create that world, a world of freedom, real justice, balance, and shared abundance, a world woven in a new design.

Starhawk

#66. Many unsustainable behaviours are locked-in and made 'normal', not just by the way that we produce and consume, but by the absence of easy alternatives

Margaret Beckett

#67. To avoid large and unsustainable budget deficits, the nation will ultimately have to choose among higher taxes, modifications to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, less spending on everything else from education to defense, or some combination of the above.

Ben Bernanke

#68. Corporate tax dodging impacts us across generations and over time. It is corrosive. It is unethical. It is unsustainable.

James P. Hoffa

#69. A global human society, characterised by islands of wealth, surrounded by a sea of poverty, is unsustainable

Thabo Mbeki

#70. The Caribbean is the region in the Americas worst affected by the epidemic of NCDs. These diseases are responsible for over two- thirds of deaths, much sickness and ill health, resulting in an unsustainable burden on our fragile economies.

Freundel Stuart

#71. Without love, life is unsustainable.

Debasish Mridha

#72. In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.

Peter Thiel

#73. The most pressing and significant problems in the global economy are unsustainable structural issues with regard to the E.U. - fiscal deficits and the structure of the E.U. itself.

Henry Paulson

#74. The level of consumption that we identify with success is utterly unsustainable. We're gobbling up the world.

John Robbins

#75. Thanks to evolution, our bodies have powerful ways to ward off illness and infection and enable us to live long and healthy lives. Why, then, do health costs continue to climb at unsustainable and frightening rates?

David Suzuki

#76. Kids are meeting in coffee shops and basements figuring out what's unsustainable in their communities. That's the future.

Ian Somerhalder

#77. Without calling the overall national issue a bubble, it's pretty clear that it's an unsustainable underlying pattern.

Alan Greenspan

#78. Greece is an extreme case: a country where both the level of spending and the level of taxation were unsustainable!

Malcolm Turnbull

#79. I've always had this vision that the touring lifestyle is so unsustainable. But I have faith that I can do it, and I don't become a victim of my job or my work. And I can remove my self-worth from what I make and how many people show up.

Thao Nguyen

#80. The present system is unsustainable. The only question is whether we will master the change or it will master us.

Hillary Clinton

#81. Today, the top one-tenth of 1% owns nearly as much wealth as the bottom 90%. The economic game is rigged, and this level of inequality is unsustainable. We need an economy that works for all, not just the powerful.

Bernie Sanders

#82. The 'Occupy' movement has no real solutions, except more government, more spending, more regulation, more bureaucracy, more unsustainable lethargic pseudo-university with no return on investment, more more more of what got us into this hole.

Mark Steyn

#83. At Concerned Veterans for America, we've made the case that the defense budget could be targeted for spending reform, but in a targeted fashion that genuinely changes unsustainable spending trajectories while preserving U.S. defense capacity.

Pete Hegseth

#84. There's no law of physics that says we have to be an unsustainable society - in fact, quite the opposite. The planet's ready to work with us if we're ready to think differently, but we do have to make that jump and start to do things in new ways.

Alex Steffen

#85. Obama's Democrats have become the part of no. Real cuts to federal budget? No. Entitlement reform? No. Tax reform? No. Breaking the corrupt and fiscally unsustainable symbiosis between public-sector unions and state governments? Hell no.

Charles Krauthammer

#86. A world in which government is burdened by historic debt, philanthropy has limited resources, and the private sector is only interested in its own personal gain is simply unsustainable.

Simon Mainwaring

#87. Idealistic notions that guide a younger person frequently prove unsustainable. Concluding any stage of life demands that a person rebuilds oneself after living destroys our ideological beliefs.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#88. Don't accept that you can't make a difference. Because if you can't make a difference, you won't make a difference, and if you put a multiplier on that we will continue on an unsustainable pathway.

Maurice Strong

#89. The British political system and the whole clapped out Westminster architecture, and the language that we use about politics, it's completely unsustainable. You either decide to be part of that transition to do something different. Or you cling to old certainties.

Nick Clegg

#90. Leaders of institutions everywhere have lost trust. The global economy is stalled and the world is deeply divided, too unequal, unstable and unsustainable.

Don Tapscott

#91. Almost every economist agrees that the American health care system is unsustainable. Medical care is so expensive that it is busting all of our budgets - government, business, and personal. Eventually, the medical price bubble will pop. What, then, are the alternatives?

Jim Cooper

#92. As the great grandchildren of the industrial revolution, we have learned, at last, that the heedless pursuit of more is unsustainable and, ultimately, unfulfilling. Our planet, our security, our sense of equanimity and our very souls demand something better, something different.

Gary Hamel