Natural Resource Quotes & Sayings

Consider that the earth is a processing plant, a factory. Picture a tumbler used to polish rocks: a rolling drum filled with water and sand. Consider that your soul is dropped in as an ugly rock, some raw mineral or natural resource, crude oil, mineral ore. And all conflict and pain is the abrasive that rubs us, polishes our soul, refines us, teaches and finishes us over lifetime after lifetime. — Chuck Palahniuk

The other night, the president gave a speech. He said, "children are our most prescious natural resource". I thought, "let's hope it never comes to that". — Emo Philips

Women-the greatest natural resource in the world today. — Edward Steichen

Money is only important in a society when certain resources for survival must be rationed and the people accept money as an exchange medium for the scarce resources. Money is a social convention, an agreement if you will. It is neither a natural resource nor does it represent one. It is not necessary for survival unless we have been conditioned to accept it as such. — Jacque Fresco

I recommend, for many people, the study of computer science. Our natural resource in America is the mind. The mindset in computer science is very similar to the mindset in Zen. — Frederick Lenz

Doing your own thing is a generous act. Being gifted creates obligations, which means you owe the world your best effort at the work you love. You too are a natural resource. — Barbara Sher

What is such a resource worth? Anything it costs. If we never hike it or step into its shade, if we only drive by occasionally and see the textures of green mountainside change under wind and sun, or the fog move soft feathers down the gulches, or the last sunset on the continent redden the sky beyond the ridge, we have our money's worth. We have been too efficient at destruction; we have left our souls too little space to breathe in. Every green natural place we save saves a fragment of our sanity and gives us a little more hope that we have a future. — Wallace Stegner

Poland is quite a mediocre country in some regards. The only natural resource that we have, and with which we can compete, is freedom. — Donald Tusk

All our efforts to defeat poverty and pursue sustainable development will be in vain if environmental degradation and natural resource depletion continue unabated. — Kofi Annan

Children are our most valuable natural resource. — Herbert Hoover

In families one can't choose one's siblings. Within regions one doesn't choose one's neighbors. And if you are one of the world's leading producers of a critical industrial resource like copper, in the end you can't really choose your customers. China and Zambia will just have to get along. — Howard W. French

The electronic spectrum is the only natural resource in which there's no such thing as private property rights. You can't own a piece of the spectrum. — Adrian Cronauer

It is a sad irony that many countries possessing natural resources with high income potential have floundered into civil strife as factions compete for their share of the bounty, often monopolized by despotic leaders. Sharing the resource wealth across the country is one suggested way to defuse the threat of political conflict, usually by transferring part of the earnings to local area governments and, in particular, to the area where the natural resource is exploited, be it oil, diamonds or other minerals. In some cases, this fiscal devolution route has limited the conflict, if the amount transferred is large enough. However, in others it has triggered conflict by giving local dissidents the means to pay for insurrection.57 It turns out that the optimum way to defuse or prevent potential conflict is to pay direct cash transfers to all individuals, which would make it much more difficult for secessionist movements or local political parties to appropriate the resources. — Guy Standing

Seeing the rebirth of the Delaware Estuary as a valuable natural resource is certainly encouraging, and I am encouraged not just by the progress made in the Delaware Estuary but in estuaries throughout the country. — Jim Gerlach

We are now heading down a centuries-long path toward increasing the productivity of our natural capital - the resource systems upon which we depend to live - instead of our human capital. — Paul Hawken

Very soon nations will understand that in reality Water is the most expensive natural resource for their survivals. Not Middle East oil neither African gold. — M.F. Moonzajer

Paradox ... Rich in natural resources but poor in the quality of our human resource — Fela Durotoye

I am tired of the warmakers making war with our children. I am tired of our tired troops being sent over to do the dirty work for mob bosses who are going to squeeze the life out of Iraq and not leave until every asset and every natural resource has been raped from the country. I am tired of seeing Iraqis burying their loved ones and hearing the reverberating screams of mothers all over our country who are being destroyed for the benefit of a very few. — Cindy Sheehan

The greatest natural resource that any country can have is its children. — Danny Kaye

Play is the best natural resource in a creative economy. Kids need more of it. It is the work of childhood. We hope to intrinsically change the opinion that play is not just a luxury but an absolute necessity for kids' lives. — Darell Hammond

There are many outsiders that actively try to halt every natural resource development project in Alaska. Many of these same people have never even been to Alaska, yet they claim to know what's best for us. — Lisa Murkowski

Water is the most precious, limited natural resource we have in this country ... But because water belongs to no one - except the people - special interests, including government polluters, use it as their private sewers. — Ralph Nader

Man's brain is, after all, the greatest natural resource. — Karl Brandt

There's this idea that it has to be made in London. But we've got everything up here, and if you've got comics who are gifted because of where they're from, you shouldn't drag them away from that natural resource. — Johnny Vegas

Typography is not only a technology but is in itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also
patterns of communal interdependence. — Marshall McLuhan

The paradigm of the development of natural resource-based industry - meatpacking, lard, timber, iron and coal, grain. Cincinnati's lard processing plants looked a lot like JDR's oil refineries thirty years later. — Charles R. Morris

Energy is the master resource, because energy enables us to convert one material into another. As natural scientists continue to learn more about the transformation of materials from one form to another with the aid of energy, energy will be even more important. — Julian Simon

It seems that almost every time a valuable natural resource is discovered in the world-whether it be diamonds, rubber, gold, oil, whatever-often what results is a tragedy for the country in which they are found. Making matters worse, the resulting riches from these resources rarely benefit the people of the country from which they come. — Edward Zwick

When you meet a head of state, and you say, 'What is your most precious natural resource?' they will not say children at first, and then when you say, 'children,' they will pretty quickly agree with you. — Nicholas Negroponte

Children, be worried when they call you America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they've done to the other natural resources? — Utah Phillips

As Dalla Costa put it, women's unpaid
labor in the home has been the pillar upon which the exploitation of the waged workers, "wage slavery," has been built, and the secret of ies productivity (1972:31). Thus, the power differential between women and men in capitalist societry cannot be attributed to the irrelevance of housework for capitalist accumulation - an irrelevance belied by the strict rules that have governed women's lives - nor CO the survival of timeless cultural schemes. Rather, it should be interpreted as the effect of a social system of production that does not recognize the production and reproduction of the worker as a social-economic activity. and a source of capital accumulation, but mystifies it instead as a natural resource or a personal service, willie profiting from the wageless conclition of the labor involved. — Silvia Federici

Sustainable development: Meeting present needs without compromising the stock of natural resources remaining for future generations. In terms of buildings, it implies resource efficiency, minimum energy use, flexibility and long life — Richard Rogers

Poetry is a natural energy resource of our country. It has no energy crisis, possessing a potential that will last as long as the country. Its power is equal to that of any country in the world. — Richard Eberhart

Water is our most precious and interconnected natural resource. It sustains all ecosystems, communities, and economies from local watersheds to the seas. It's vital to sustaining our health, safety, and the environments in which we live and work. Simply put, water is life. — Alexandra Cousteau

We must treat water as if it were the most precious thing in the world, the most valuable natural resource. Be economical with water! Don't waste it! We still have time to do something about this problem before it is too late. — Mikhail Gorbachev

Tears may be considered as the natural and involuntary resource of the mind overcome by some sudden and violent emotion, before ithas had time to reconcile its feelings to the change in circumstances: while laughter may be defined to be the same sort of convulsive and involuntary movement, occasioned by mere sur prise or contrast (in the absence of any more serious emotion), before it has time to reconcile its belief to contradictory appearances. — William Hazlitt

[For American consumer society], the country's reserves of ignorance constitute a natural resource as precious as the Mississippi River or the long-lost herds of buffalo. — Lewis H. Lapham

It takes time
loose, unstructured dreamtime
to experience nature in a meaningful way. Unless parents are vigilant, such time becomes a scarce resource, not because we intend it to shrink, but because time is consumed by multiple, invisible forces; because our culture currently places so little value on natural play. — Richard Louv

Words are humanity's greatest natural resource, but most of us have trouble figuring out how to put them together. Words aren't cheap. They are very precious. They are like water, which gives life and growth and refreshment, but because it has always been abundant, we treat it cheaply. We waste it; we pollute it, and doctor it. Later we blame the quality of the water because we have misused it. — Katherine Paterson

Plastic should be a high value material ... [It] should be in products that last a long time, and at the end of the life, you recycle it. To take oil or natural gas that took millions of years to produce and then to make a disposable product that last minutes or seconds, and then to just discard it
I think that's not a good way of using this resource. (Robert Haley) — Susan Freinkel

I always felt like if you get to a point where you've got enough money to invest in something real, you gotta invest in anything that's related to a natural resource because that's gonna be here forever - so you might as well invest in something that's gonna be here, rather than invest in something that's gonna wear out. — Akon

I do not believe there is a natural resource economics. I believe there is good economics and bad economics. — Milton Friedman

There was a natural resource in the affective devotion to the saints and to Jesus, and a similar intensity of devotion inevitably became directed to the ordinary human.7 Eleanor of Aquitaine, the paragon of courtly love at the courts of Angers and Poitiers, was a grandchild of Guillaume, duke of Aquitaine, the first known troubadour. In many of Guillaume's love songs 'the vocabulary and emotional fervor hitherto ordinarily used to express man's love for God are transferred to the liturgical worship of woman, and vice versa.'8 The layering of Christian feeling and the new romantic spirit is also witnessed in the roman courtois, the epic stories filled with legendary material and hinged on figures of woman, mystery and quest. — Anthony Bartlett

To know that children are suffering and going without food is intolerable in a society such as ours. I hope that all our leaders, in both the public and private sectors, will work tirelessly to eradicate hunger. We all have a responsibility to bring back life to our most precious natural resource. — Joan Lunden

The discovery of oil occurred shortly after the Addis Ababa agreement, the pact that ended the first civil war, that first one lasting almost seventeen years. In 1972, the north and south of Sudan met in Ethiopia, and the peace agreement was signed, including, among other things, provisions to share any of the natural resources of the south, fifty-fifty. Khartoum had agreed to this, but at the time, they believed the primary natural resource in the south was uranium. But at Addis Ababa, no one knew about oil, so when the oil was found, Khartoum was concerned. They had signed this agreement, and the agreement insisted that all resources be split evenly ... But not with oil! To share oil with blacks? This would not do! It was terrible for them, I think, and that is when much of the hard-liners in Khartoum began thinking about canceling Addis Ababa and keeping the oil for themselves. — Dave Eggers

The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs. — Alan Kay

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we'll look back at the first decade of the 21st century when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we'd crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once? — Thomas Friedman

Up here in Alaska we're sitting on billions of barrels of oil. We're sitting on hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of natural gas onshore and offshore. And it seems to be only the Republicans who understand that companies should be competing for the right to tap those resources, and get that energy source flowing into these hungry markets so that we will be less reliant on foreign sources of energy. In a volatile world, relying on foreign regimes that are not friendly to Americans, asking them to ramp up resource production for our benefit, that's nonsensical. — Sarah Palin

If you think of every single continent there is, on every continent, there is something, a natural resource that every continent has, or sources, that they can really survive with that, or they can trade with that. But a lot of the developed nations have taken those things from those places and have claimed it and, therefore, they're dependent on those other nations. — Stevie Wonder

You are about to be told one more time that you are America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they do to valuable natural resources?! Have you seen a strip mine? Have you seen a clear cut in the forest? Have you seen a polluted river? Don't ever let them call you a valuable natural resource! They're going to strip mine your soul. They're going to clear cut your best thoughts for the sake of profit unless you learn to resist, because the profit system follows the path of least resistance and following the path of least resistance is what makes the river crooked! — Utah Phillips

Coal used to be a very dirty fuel but coal has become cleaner and cleaner over the decades. Clean coal now is quite clean. Clean coal now has the same emissions profile as natural gas. Clean coal can become cleaner still. We can take even more of the pollutants out of coal and I believe we should. Clean coal, I think, is the immediate answer to Canada's energy needs and the world's energy needs. There are hundreds of years available of coal supplies. We shouldn't be squandering that resource. We should be using it prudently. — Lawrence Solomon

But man has still another powerful resource: natural science with its strictly objective methods. — Ivan Pavlov

Environmental activism against the resource industry is widespread all over the world, but at the same time we have to realise that these are basic materials on which civilisation depends. We need to tap natural resources in a sustainable manner. — Anil Agarwal

Children are our greatest natural resource. — Herbert Hoover

As slaves we were this country's first windfall, the down payment on its freedom. After the ruin and liberation of the Civil War came Redemption for the unrepentant South and Reunion, and our bodies became this country's second mortgage. In the New Deal we were their guestroom, their finished basement. And today, with a sprawling prison system, which has turned the warehousing of black bodies into a jobs program for Dreamers and a lucrative investment for Dreamers; today, when 8 percent of the world's prisoners are black men, our bodies have refinanced the Dream of being white. Black life is cheap, but in America black bodies are a natural resource of incomparable value. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Young people, I happen to believe, are the world's most precious natural resource. — Nicholas Negroponte

Innovation is deviance which means that the rebellious personality is a natural resource for practical creativity. As an innovator, you need to reject the old to establish a new, better, status quo. And one of the most powerful sources of newness is the rebel or maverick, mind. — Max McKeown

Despite its growing scarcity and preciousness to life, ironically, water is also man's most misgoverned, inefficiently allocated and profligately wasted natural resource. — Steven Solomon

I believe deeply that children are more powerful than oil, more beautiful than rivers, more precious than any other natural resource a country can have. — Danny Kaye

Social Ecology:
The notion that man must dominate nature emerges directly from the domination of man by man ... But it was not until organic community relation ... dissolved into market relationships that the planet itself was reduced to a resource for exploitation. This centuries-long tendency finds its most exacerbating development in modern capitalism. Owing to its inherently competitive nature, bourgeois society not only pits humans against each other, it also pits the mass of humanity against the natural world. Just as men are converted into commodities, so every aspect of nature is converted into a commodity, a resource to be manufactured and merchandised wantonly. ... The plundering of the human spirit by the market place is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital. — Murray Bookchin

Parenting classes should be mandatory, whether you are adopting or not, and would include an evaluation of your current physical, mental and financial state as well as how ready you are to take on the rigors of parenthood. Our children are our most precious natural resource, and there is absolutely no other way to parent but to put them first. — Dale Archer

Twenty years ago, the top 100 companies in the Fortune 500 either dug something out of the ground or turned a natural resource (iron ore or oil) into something you could hold. Today, fewer than half of the companies on the list do that. The rest make unseemly profits by trafficking in ideas. — Seth Godin

The federal government's role is to establish a process whereby industry can pitch a project, and Canadians can be reassured that this project is worth the risk. That's at the heart of governments granting permits and communities granting permission. People understand we do need economic growth. We do need natural resource projects. — Justin Trudeau

Natural gas is a better transportation fuel than gasoline, so if that's the case, it's cheaper, it's cleaner and it's a domestic resource. — T. Boone Pickens

New technology lets you grow the resource pie, which is the only way you can get out between that pincer of rising consumption (as we end poverty) and environmental and natural resource depletion. — Ramez Naam

If we could treat every natural resource as a gift rather than a commodity, we would be on the path to sustainability. The difference is that a gift does not belong to us but to the universe. It comes into our lives from a source that is unknown and ultimately unknowable; eventually , it returns to its source. — Victor Shamas

The basic economic resource - the means of production -
is no longer capital, nor natural resources, nor labor.
It is and will be knowledge. — Peter Drucker

I think, too, that we've got to recognize that where the preservation of a natural resource like the redwoods is concerned, that there is a common sense limit. I mean, if you've looked at a hundred thousand acres or so of trees-you know, a tree is a tree, how many more do you need to look at?
Opposing expansion of Redwood National Park. — Ronald Reagan

No "natural" resource is more precious and to be used more wisely than time. These mortal moments matter more than we know. There are no idle hours; there are only idle people. In true righteousness there is serenity, but there is an array of reminders that the "sacred present" is packed with possibilities which are slipping by us, which are going away from us each moment. — Neal A. Maxwell

The kind of precision manufacturing epitomized in the armories, while it was important, was only a small share of the economy until quite late in the century. Large-scale natural resource development and processing was the name of the game. — Charles R. Morris

Bolivia also depends not only on tin and other minerals, but also depends on the gas and oil. A rational extraction should be made, taking care of the environment. We should give added value to this natural resource, and generate revenue to fight poverty with more resources, that come from natural resources. — Evo Morales

From earliest times, water has always been acknowledged as a primary human good and an indispensable natural resource. Around the great rivers of the world, like the Mississippi, great cultures have developed, while over the course of the centuries the prosperity of countless societies has been linked to these waterways. Today, however, the great fluvial systems of every continent are exposed to serious threats, often as a result of man's activity and decisions. — Pope Benedict XVI

Changing much-cherished bank secrecy laws is worth the effort. Corruption, tax evasion, and the capture of natural resource revenues undermine the rule of law, weaken the social fabric, erode citizens' trust in institutions, fuel conflict and insecurity, and hamper job creation. — Sri Mulyani Indrawati

More than ever, it's very apparent that we are strapped for natural resources. We configure and reconfigure to try and find a way to maintain natural assets, when, ultimately, we are overlooking the most abundant, dynamic, and powerful resource we have available to us - our youth. — Ian Somerhalder

The greatest natural resource our country has is not oil. It's not gas. It's not coal. It's the genius of our children. — Cory Booker