If we are concerned about our great appetite for materials, it is plausible to decrease waste, to make better use of stocks available, and to develop substitutes. But what about the appetite itself? The major cause of the continued deterioration of the global environment is the unsustainable pattern of consumption and production, particularly in industrialised countries

This is a world inhabited not by people who have to be persuaded to believe but by people who want an excuse to believe.

Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.

The urge to consume is fathered by the value system which emphasizes the ability of the society to produce.

It is a commonplace of modern technology that problems have solutions before there is knowledge of how they are to be solved.

In the usual (though certainly not in every) public decision on economic policy, the choice is between courses that are almost equally good or equally bad. It is the narrowest decisions that are most ardently debated.

The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.