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"In the realm of time there is no aristocracy of wealth, and no aristocracy of intellect. Genius is never rewarded by even an extra hour a day. And there is no punishment. Waste your infinitely precious commodity as much as you will, and the supply will never be withheld from you. No mysterious power will say: 'This man is a fool, if not a knave. He does not deserve time; he shall be cut off at the meter.' It is more certain than consols, and payment of income is not affected by Sundays. Moreover, you cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt! You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste tomorrow; it is kept for you. You cannot waste the next hour; it is kept for you." Arnold Bennett   "Few carbon offsets actually reduce carbon emissions. Many are scams. Some pay landowners to not cut down trees they were never going to log. Others pay renewable energy developers who were already going to build wind and solar projects. Most solar panels and electric car batteries are made in Xinjiang, China by incarcerated Uyghur Muslims. Solar projects require 300-600 times more land than nuclear or natural gas plants and are devastating fragile desert environments. And there is no waste disposal solution for used solar panels, a hazardous waste, which means they will be sent to landfills or dumped on poor nations." Michael Shellenberger   "The American people haven't been led astray by the peddlers of pessimism and despair. They understand that the damage of decades of waste, mismanagement, inflation, and economic decay will not vanish overnight. And I suspect they've also noticed that quite a few of the people shedding crocodile tears over our current economic plight and taking potshots at our recovery program are the very people who led us into this swamp in the first place. Speaking of swamps, I want to urge you all not to get bogged down in Potomac fever. Don't let the Washington whirl or the Washington morass let you lose sight of why we came here and what it is that we're all trying to do. I know it isn't always easy. As the old saying goes, 'When you're up to your armpits in alligators, it's sometimes hard to remember that your original intention was to drain the swamp.' That's not why you're here and I'm here. We're here to cut back on waste and mismanagement; to eliminate unnecessary, restrictive regulations that make it harder for the American economy to compete and harder for American workers to find jobs; to drain the swamp of overtaxation, overregulation, and runaway inflation that has dangerously eroded our free way of life." Ronald Reagan   "Is it the interest of any man to steal, to game, to waste his health and mental faculties by drunkenness, to lie, forswear himself, indulge hatred, seek desperate revenge, or do murder? No. All these are roads to ruin. And why, then, do men tread them? Because such inclinations are among the vicious qualities of mankind." Charles Dickens   "The Congress might well consider whether the higher rates of income and profits taxes can in peace times be effectively productive of revenue, and whether they may not, on the contrary, be destructive of business activity and productive of waste and inefficiency. There is a point at which in peace times high rates of income and profits taxes discourage energy, remove the incentive to new enterprise, encourage extravagant expenditures, and produce industrial stagnation with consequent unemployment and other attendant evils." Woodrow Wilson   "The WHO's review of the scientific literature concluded that there was 'no evidence' that universal masking 'is effective in reducing transmission.' The CDC's pre-2020 planning scenarios didn't recommend universal masking or extended school and business closures even during a pandemic as severe as the 1918 Spanish flu. Neither did the UK's 2011 plan, which urged 'those who are well to carry on with their normal daily lives' and flatly declared, 'It will not be possible to halt the spread of a new pandemic influenza virus, and it would be a waste of public health resources and capacity to attempt to do so.'" John Tierney   "What a waste that we lost Mussolini. He is a first-rate man who would have led our party to power in Italy." Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov   "The genuine danger to Europe seems to me to be a matter of the spirit, of the importation of American boredom, of that dreadful, quite specific boredom that rises over there from every stone and every house on all the numbered streets. The boredom that does not, like the earlier European variety, come from calmness, from sitting on the park bench playing dominoes and smoking a pipe—a lazy waste of time indeed, but not dangerous. American boredom is restless, nervous, and aggressive; it outruns itself in its frantic haste, seeks numbness in sports and sensations. It has lost its playfulness, scurries along instead in the rabid frenzy of an eternal flight from time. It is always inventing new artifices for itself, like cinema and radio, to feed its hungry senses with nourishment for the masses, and it transforms this common interest in enjoyment into concerns as massive as its banks and trusts." Stefan Zweig   "The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young. When the primary objects of love and money could be taken for granted and a shaky eminence had lost its fascination, I had fair years to waste, years that I can't honestly regret, in seeking the eternal Carnival by the Sea." Scott Fitzgerald   "The year is 2011, and Milo Cress is in fourth grade in Burlington, Vermont. In the spirit of personal conservation, the 9-year-old launches the 'Be Straw Free' campaign to persuade neighborhood restaurants and 'concerned citizens to reduce the use and waste of disposable plastic straws.' Due to the lack of reliable figures on the issue, the fourth-grader decides to conduct a phone survey with three national manufacturers and averaged the results to reach the estimate that the country consumes 500 million straws each day. Our fledgling activist promptly earns adoring local and national coverage. Then in 2012, the nonprofit Eco-Cycle picks up Milo's campaign and partners with the National Parks Service to publish a blog poston Milo's research. And once a statistic enters the hallowed ground of a dot.gov URL—voila—the number is now enshrined as fact-checking gospel. Five years later, the 500 million figure is everywhere: appearing in CNN, USA Today, The Washington Post, Fox News, NPR, National Geographic, and The New York Times. The number graces U.N. climate reports, nonprofit white papers, and proposed bills in statehouses from Hartford to Sacramento. Climbing from a fourth grade classroom in Burlington Elementary to the governor's desk in Sacramento in seven short years—Milo's statistic grew up to be somebody." Theodore Gioia   "We notice Roman jewellery and precious metalwork less than their post-Roman equivalents, mainly because we are distracted by a mass of other luxury items that disappeared (or became very scarce) after the end of the empire: marbled and mosaiced private houses, in both town and country; baths with piped water and underfloor heating; a plethora of exotic foods, spices, and wines; as well as immensely expensive items of pure waste, like the animals imported for the sole purpose that they should die in the amphitheatre (ideally taking with them a few unfortunate slave 'huntsmen'). Very wealthy Romans even derived status from their costly libraries and their expensive literary education. This was a world where the display of social superiority could be very subtle—while paying out huge sums of money for the barbarian slaves and exotic beasts, whose slaughter in the amphitheatre was necessary to secure his status, a Roman aristocrat could also lay claim to a philosophical education that set him above such vulgar things." Bryan Ward-Perkins   "That the attempts of such men will often miscarry, we may reasonably expect; yet from such men, and such only, are we to hope for the cultivation of those parts of nature which lie yet waste, and the invention of those arts which are yet wanting to the felicity of life. If they are, therefore, universally discouraged, art and discovery can make no advances. Whatever is attempted without previous certainty of success, may be considered as a project, and amongst narrow minds may, therefore, expose its author to censure and contempt; and if the liberty of laughing be once indulged, every man will laugh at what he does not understand, every project will be considered as madness, and every great or new design will be censured as a project." Samuel Johnson   "The only way I can see to get the maximum service out of our citizens is to draft us all and to tell us all where we can be most useful and where our work is needed. So long as we are left to volunteer we are bound to waste our capacities and to do things which are not necessary." Eleanor Roosevelt   "What shall I say concerning its mastery of and its waste of mechanical power, its commonwealth so poor, its enemies of the commonwealth so rich, its stupendous organization—for the misery of life! Its contempt of simple pleasures which everyone could enjoy but for its folly? Its eyeless vulgarity which has destroyed art, the one certain solace of labour? All this I felt then as now, but I did not know why it was so. The hope of the past times was gone, the struggles of mankind for many ages had produced nothing but this sordid, aimless, ugly confusion; the immediate future seemed to me likely to intensify all the present evils by sweeping away the last survivals of the days before the dull squalor of civilization had settled down on the world." William Morris   "Usury is a great huge monster, like a werewolf, who lays waste all, more than any Cacus, Gerion or Antus. And yet decks himself out, and would be thought pious, so that people may not see where the oxen have gone, that he drags backwards into his den. But Hercules shall hear the cry of the oxen and of his prisoners, and shall seek Cacus even in cliffs and among rocks, and shall set the oxen loose again from the villain. For Cacus means the villain that is a pious usurer, and steals, robs, eats everything. And will not own that he has done it, and thinks no one will find him out, because the oxen, drawn backwards into his den, make it seem, from their footprints, that they have been let out. So the usurer would deceive the world, as though he were of use and gave the world oxen, which he, however, rends, and eats all alone." Martin Luther   "In April, the Nation wrote: 'It's chastening to note that whereas China under Xi has suppressed the latest coronavirus at the human cost of three lives per million population, the United States under Trump is still struggling to overpower it, having already sacrificed 145 of every million Americans.' In June, two public-health experts co-authored a Time op-ed titled 'U.S. Response to Covid-19 Is Worse than China's. 100 Times Worse.' 'China orchestrated a massive lockdown with school and office closures and strict stay-at-home orders centered around Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province, where the outbreak emerged, even as many around the world decried the actions as draconian,' they argued. But 'the U.S., on the other hand, continues to waste valuable time.' In October, a Reuters analysis compared the American and Chinese pandemic responses and found the former's wanting: 'About 11 months after the Wuhan outbreak, China's official GDP numbers this week show not only that the economy is growing, up 4.9% for the third quarter from a year earlier, but also that the Chinese are confident enough the virus has been vanquished to go shopping, dine and spend with gusto,' the outlet reported. In the U.S., on the other hand, '221,000 people are dead from Covid-19 after a delayed federal response, partisan battles over mask-wearing and lockdowns, and plenty of public events that do not follow public health guidelines.'" Nate Hochman   "I say it roundly; if it were not for the punctiliousness of the middle-class in these matters all our civilization would go to pieces. They are the conservators and the maintainers of the standard, the moderators of Europe, the salt of society. For the kind of man who boasts that he does not mind dirty clothes or roughing it, is either a man who cares nothing for all that civilization has built up and who rather hates it, or else (and this is much more common) he is a rich man, or accustomed to live among the rich, and can afford to waste energy and stuff because he feels in a vague way that more clothes can always be bought, that at the end of his vagabondism he can get excellent dinners, and that London and Paris are full of luxurious baths and barber shops. Of all the corrupting effects of wealth there is none worse than this, that it makes the wealthy (and their parasites) think in some way divine, or at least a lovely character of the mind, what is in truth nothing but their power of luxurious living." Hillaire Belloc   "The Norwegian Knut Hamsun waged intermittent war in his novels against tinned food, false teeth and other modern nonsense. T.S. Eliot's typist in The Waste Land 'lays out food in tins.' John Betjeman deplores the appetite of the masses for 'Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans.' Tinned salmon is repeatedly a feature of lower-class cuisine in Graham Greene. Greene records that this had a real-life origin. His Nottingham landlady always gave him tinned salmon at high tea, which he would surreptitiously feed to his dog—though it made the dog sick." John Carey   "Soldiers are often eager to ridicule, beat up and publicize the plight of those who fail to show their daring. From the point of view of strict rationality, this would seem a waste of time. Once you have established that someone is a chicken, you should simply not trust him in dangerous situations and that's that. Since you think he is not good soldier material, this will not change him in the least. All the energy and time spent browbeating and punishing the potential defector is wasted. But the expense makes sense if we realize that it is probably not directed at the victim but at all the others. That is, it sends a powerful and memorable signal that defection is very costly. This is perceived intuitively as one way to reduce the likelihood that others may defect." Pascal Boyer   "Much of it ends up illegally dumped, burned (spewing toxic fumes), or reprocessed at rudimentary facilities that leak some of the plastics into rivers. Virtually all the consumer plastics polluting the world's oceans comes from 'mismanaged waste' in developing countries. There'd be less plastic polluting the seas if Americans tossed their yogurt containers and water bottles into the trash, so that the plastic could be safely buried at the nearest landfill." John Tierney