53 Waste Reduction Quotes

In today's fast-paced world, the challenge of managing waste is greater than ever, calling for a collective effort to reduce, reuse, and recycle more effectively. The significance of waste reduction cannot be understated—it is a crucial step towards protecting our environment, conserving natural resources, and fostering sustainable living. As we strive to minimize our ecological footprint, turning to words of wisdom can provide both inspiration and motivation. In this blog post, we have carefully curated 53 powerful quotes on waste reduction. These quotes serve not only as a source of encouragement but also as a reminder of the impact our everyday choices can have on the planet. Let's embark on this journey together and embrace the principles of waste reduction with renewed vigor and commitment.

1. “Youth is wasted on the young.” - George Bernard Shaw

2. “Were all the geniuses of history to focus on this single theme, they could never fully express their bafflement at the darkness of the human mind. No person would give up even an inch of their estate, and the slightest dispute with a neighbor can mean hell to pay; yet we easily let others encroach on our lives—worse, we often pave the way for those who will take it over. No person hands out their money to passersby, but to how many do each of us hand out our lives! We’re tight-fisted with property and money, yet think too little of wasting time, the one thing about which we should all be the toughest misers.” - seneca

3. “Never waste a minute thinking about people you don't like.” - Dwight D. Eisenhower

4. “A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.” - Charles Darwin

5. “Time spent with a cat is never wasted.” - Colette

6. “Woe betide the leaders now perched on their dizzy pinnacles of triumph if they cast away at the conference table what the soldiers had won on a hundred bloodsoaked battlefields.” - Winston S. Churchill

7. “I have so much in me, and the feeling for her absorbs it all; I have so much, and without her it all comes to nothing.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

8. “Spend the years of learning squanderingCourage for the years of wanderingThrough a world politely turningFrom the loutishness of learning.” - Samuel Beckett

9. “It is strange that people train themselves so carefully to go to waste so prematurely” - Robert Aickman

10. “There is no beauty in sadness. No honor in suffering. No growth in fear. No relief in hate. It’s just a waste of perfectly good happiness.” - Katerina Stoykova Klemer

11. “When the war (WWI) finally ended it was necessary for both sides to maintain, indeed even to inflate, the myth of sacrifice so that the whole affair would not be seen for what it was: a meaningless waste of millions of lives. Logically, if the flower of youth had been cut down in Flanders, the survivors were not the flower: the dead were superior to the traumatized living. In this way, the virtual destruction of a generation further increased the distance between the old and the young, between the official and the unofficial.” - Robert Hughes

12. “The "old school" of wastewater treatment, still embraced by most government regulators and many academics, considers water to be a vehicle for the routine transfer of waste from on place to another. It also considers the accompanying organic material to be of little or no value. The "new school", on the other hand, sees water as a dwindling, precious resource that should not be polluted with waste; organic materials are seen as resources that should be constructively recycled. My research for this chapter included reviewing hundreds of research papers on alternative wastewater systems. I was amazed at the incredible amount of time and money that has gone into studying how to clean the water we have polluted with human excrement. In all of the research papers, without exception, the idea that we should simply stop defecating in water was never suggested.” - Joseph C. Jenkins

13. “It's such a shame to waste time. We always think we have so much of it.” - Mitch Albom

14. “Depression, as far as I'm concerned, is just a waste of time.” - Helen Reddy

15. “The typical capitalists are lovers of power rather than sensual indulgence, but they have the same tendency to crush and to take tribute that the cruder types of sensualism possess. The discipline of the capitalist is the same as that of the frugalist. He differs from the latter in that he has no regard for the objects through which productive power is acquired. HE does not hesitate to exploit natural resources, lands, dumb animals and even his fellowman. Capital to such a man is an abstract fund, made up of perishable elements which are quickly replaced… The frugalist…stands in marked contrast to the attitude of the capitalist. The frugalist takes a vital interest in his tools, in his land, and in the goods he produces. He has a definite attachment to each. He dislikes to see an old coat wear out, an old wagon break down, or an old horse go lame. He always thinks of concrete things, wants them and nothing else. He desires not land, but a given farm, not horses or cattle and machines, but particular breeds and implements; not shelter, but a home…. He rejects as unworthy what is below standard and despises as luxurious what is above or outside of it. Dominated by activities, he thinks of capital as a means to an end.” - Ellen Ruppel Shell

16. “A man by his sin may waste himself, which is to waste that which on earth is most like God. This is man's greatest tragedy and God's heaviest grief.” - A. W. Tozer

17. “Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste.” - G.K. Chesterton

18. “I do not know what she was thinking, but I was remembering the years we have lived together, yet never together, and what a waste they have been--of each other, and of love, which is the most unpardonable waste there is. Love and time, those are the only two things in all the world and all of life that cannot be bought, but only spent.” - Gary Jennings

19. “Full many a gem of purest ray serene,The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,And waste its sweetness on the desert air.” - Thomas Gray

20. “Energy wasted on negative ends.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

21. “Don't waste your love on somebody, who doesn't value it.” - William Shakespeare

22. “[S]ome score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be --- as here they are --- mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horse-hair warded heads against walls of words, and making a pretence of equity with serious faces ....” - Charles Dickens

23. “The youthful body untouched decays the fastest, for no living hands record its splendor; and here youth and time are wasted.” - Roman Payne

24. “It starts so young, and I'm angry about that. The garbage we're taught. About love, about what's "romantic." Look at so many of the so-called romantic figures in books and movies. Do we ever stop and think how many of them would cause serious and drastic unhappiness after The End? Why are sick and dangerous personality types so often shown a passionate and tragic and something to be longed for when those are the very ones you should run for your life from? Think about it. Heathcliff. Romeo. Don Juan. Jay Gatsby. Rochester. Mr. Darcy. From the rigid control freak in The Sound of Music to all the bad boys some woman goes running to the airport to catch in the last minute of every romantic comedy. She should let him leave. Your time is so valuable, and look at these guys--depressive and moody and violent and immature and self-centered. And what about the big daddy of them all, Prince Charming? What was his secret life? We dont know anything about him, other then he looks good and comes to the rescue.” - Deb Caletti

25. “..either immediately or ultimately every dollar of government spending must be raised through a dollar of taxation. Once we look at the matter. In this way, the supposed miracles of government spending will appear in another light.” - Henry Hazlitt

26. “For every dollar that is spent on the (boondoggle) bridge a dollar will be taken away from taxpayers. If the bridge costs $1,000,000 the taxpayers will lose $1,000, 000. They will have that much taken away from them which they would otherwise have spent on the things they needed most.” - Henry Hazlitt

27. “When the government makes loans or subsidies to business, what it does is to tax successful private business in order to support unsuccessful private business.” - Henry Hazlitt

28. “It is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much. ... The life we receive is not short but we make it so; we are not ill provided but use what we have wastefully.” - Lucius Annaeus Seneca

29. “Are not half our lives spent in reproaches for foregone actions, of the true nature and consequences of which we were wholly ignorant at the time?” - Herman Melville

30. “Never waste any time you can spend sleeping.” - Frank H. Knight

31. “American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash--all of them--surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered in rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use.” - John Steinbeck

32. “A life is not a waste of time” - Nalini Singh

33. “Așteptarea ne dă iluzia că facem ceva așteptând, când, de fapt, nu facem altceva decât să murim suportabil, puțin câte puțin…” - Octavian Paler

34. “Americans make more trash than anyone else on the planet, throwing away about 7.1 pounds per person per day, 365 days a year. Across a lifetime that rate means, on average, we are each on track to generate 102 tons of trash. Each of our bodies may occupy only one cemetery plot when we’re done with this world, but a single person’s 102-ton trash legacy will require the equivalent of 1,100 graves. Much of that refuse will outlast any grave marker, pharaoh’s pyramid or modern skyscraper: One of the few relics of our civilization guaranteed to be recognizable twenty thousand years from now is the potato chip bag.” - Edward Humes

35. “worksheets - the archenemy of abundant, purposeful reading (and discussion and writing).” - Mike Schmoker

36. “When we unnecessarily elongate the process of "learning to read," we postpone "reading to learn" - learning itself - by years.” - Mike Schmoker

37. “These programs and reading series are the fruit of an intellectually exhausted literacy industry that lost its way long ago, even as we mutely accepted its misguided agenda - to complicate reading and literacy so that we will purchase its programs and materials.” - Mike Schmoker

38. “We should remember Christ's words, 'Let nothing be wasted,' when we look in our refrigerators and garbage cans and garages.” - Randy Alcorn

39. “It has never been easy for me to understand the obliteration of time, to accept, as others seem to do, the swelling and corresponding shrinkage of seasons or the conscious acceptance that one year has ended and another begun. There is something here that speaks of our essential helplessness and how the greater substance of our lives is bound up with waste and opacity... How can so much time hold so little, how can it be taken from us? Months, weeks, days, hours misplaced – and the most precious time of life, too, when our bodies are at their greatest strength, and open, as they never will be again, to the onslaught of sensation.” - Carol Shields

40. “It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing.” - seneca

41. “It's so egotistical to believe that we know more about someone else's reality than they do, and such a waste of time.” - Shreve Stockton

42. “He did not waste time in a vain search for a place in history.” - Dejan Stojanovic

43. “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air.” - Paul Hoffman

44. “Am I ever angry or frustrated? I only feel angry sometimes when I see waste, when things that we waste are what people need, things that would save them from dying. Frustrated? No, never.” - Mother Teresa

45. “My mom would spy by satellite, turning down the air conditioning, colder and colder, with a tapping keystroke via her wireless connection, chilling that house, that one room, meat locker cold, ski-slope cold, spending a king's ransom on Freon and electric power, trying to make some doomed ten bucks' worth of pretty pink flowers last one more day.” - Chuck Palahniuk

46. “When all that you've tried, leaves nothing but holes inside.” - Joe Brooks

47. “I've never really understood why people sleep. Wasting a third of your life and becoming vulnerable for almost 8 hours every night. Doesn't seem very appealing to me.” - Banksy

48. “I was made to learn Latin and Greek, but I resented it, being of opinion that it was silly to learn a language that was no longer spoken. I believe that all the little good I got from years of classical studies I could have got in adult life in a month.” - Bertrand Russell

49. “21Most food goes to waste in affluent societies. When we throw leftovers into the garbage, it goes to waste. When we eat more food than we need, it goes to waist.” - Earle Gray

50. “The meaning of our lives is to justify where our bosses spent their budget.” - Lisa Schaefer

51. “If you do not waste, you do not want.” - Syed Ather

52. “There's not one good thought in that place. There's nothing but waste and want. I can feel his selfish cravings and an abyss of secrets I hope to never know.” - Steve V. Cypert

53. “You…you need to move on,” I managed. Yes, that was a sound reason. “You need to find someone else. You know I don’t—that I can’t. Well, you know. You’re wasting your time with me.”He remained firm. “It’s my time to waste.” - Richelle Mead