Resources Material Quotes & Sayings

Cities and landscapes are illustrations of our spiritual and material worth. They not only express our values but give them a tangible reality. They determine the way in which we use or squander our energy, time, and land resources. — Leon Krier

When understanding fails, there is always more force in reserve. As the "experiments in material and human resources control" collapse and "revolutionary development" grinds to a halt, we simply resort more openly to the Gestapo tactics that are barely concealed behind the facade of pacification. When American cities explode, we can expect the same. The technique of "limited warfare" translates neatly into a system of domestic repression - far more humane, as will quickly be explained, than massacring those who are unwilling to wait for the inevitable victory of the war on poverty. Why should a liberal intellectual be so persuaded of the virtues of a political system of four-year dictatorship? The answer seem all to plain. — Noam Chomsky

In effect, a selfish and boundless thirst for power and material prosperity leads both to the misuse of available natural resources and to the exclusion of the weak and the disadvantaged. — Pope Francis

I have often said China is not lacking in material resources. The question is whether we can make full and good use of them. — Chiang Kai-shek

An economy that adds value through information, ideas, and intelligence-the Three I Economy-offers a way out of the apparent clash between material growth and environmental resources. — Charles Handy

Nigeria has no business with poverty. With our human and material resources, we shall strive to eradicate poverty from our country. — Olusegun Obasanjo

Democracy functions insofar as individuals can participate meaningfully in the public arena, meanwhile running their own affairs, individually and collectively, without illegitimate interference by concentrations of power. Functioning democracy presupposes relative equality in access to resources - material, informational, and other - a truism as old as Aristotle. In theory, governments are instituted to serve their "domestic constituencies" and are to be subject to their will. A measure of functioning democracy, then, is the extent to which the theory approximates reality, and the "domestic constituencies" genuinely approximate the population. — Noam Chomsky

Poor people can be greedy, too. It's just that they don't have any material resources. We need shaping of the souls as well as shaping of our institutions. — Cornel West

It is also very important to observe, that menial servants are absolutely necessary to make the resources of the higher and middle classes of society efficient in the demand for material products. — Thomas Malthus

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 Jenkins

Let us see as steadily and completely as possible the realities of our age: the wasted lives, the scattered and misused resources (human and material), the steel magic of the misdirected machinery, the mad clockwork tragedy of it all. — Clarence John Laughlin

More than a billion women around the world want to emulate western women's lifestyles and are rapidly acquiring the material ability to do so. It is therefore vital that in our leadership we display some reserve and responsibility in our spending so that the world's finite resources will be available for our children, their children and their children's children — Louise Burfitt-Dons

Since the bicycle makes little demand on material or energy resources, contributes little to pollution, makes a positive contribution to health and causes little death or injury, it can be regarded as the most benevolent of machines. — S. S. Wilson

I don't have to look far and wide to discover that material wealth alone is not enough to build a great nation. There are many countries in the world, especially in developing countries of Africa, Asia and South America that are enormously wealthy in natural resources and yet have a poor population. — Sunday Adelaja

The attitude which the man in the street unconsciously adopts towards science is capricious and varied. At one moment he scorns the scientist for a highbrow, at another anathematizes him for blasphemously undermining his religion; but at the mention of a name like Edison he falls into a coma of veneration. When he stops to think, he does recognize, however, that the whole atmosphere of the world in which he lives is tinged by science, as is shown most immediately and strikingly by our modern conveniences and material resources. A little deeper thinking shows him that the influence of science goes much farther and colors the entire mental outlook of modern civilised man on the world about him. — Percy Williams Bridgman

Another error that prognosticators make is to consider the transformations that will result from a single trend in today's world as if nothing else will change. A good example is the concern that radical life extension will result in overpopulation and the exhaustion of limited material resources to sustain human life, which ignores comparably radical wealth creation from nanotechnology and strong AI. For example, nanotechnology-based manufacturing devices in the 2020s will be capable of creating almost any physical product from inexpensive raw materials and information. — Ray Kurzweil

I don't think that the war serves U.S. interests. I think Osama bin Laden's interests and the Iranian interests are very much served by it, and it's becoming a huge drain on our resources both material and political. — William Odom

Standing side by side children with our heads together, we are trying to understand their learning based on what we observe as they use the social, technical, symbolic, and material resources at their disposal. — Denny Taylor

And in garbage we find material proof that there is no plan for stewarding the earth, that resources are not being conserved, that waste and destruction are the necessary analogues of consumer society. This — Heather Rogers

We are determined not to take as the aim of our life fame, profit, wealth, or sensual pleasure, nor to accumulate wealth while millions are hungry and dying. We are committed to living simply and sharing our time, energy, and material resources with those who are in need. — Nhat Hanh

We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly. — T. S. Eliot

Permaculture principles focus on thoughtful designs for small-scale intensive systems which are labor efficient and which use biological resources instead of fossil fuels. Designs stress ecological connections and closed energy and material loops. The core of permaculture is design and the working relationships and connections between all things. — Bill Mollison

America is a knowledge-based society, where information counts as much as material resources. Therefore those with the power to define what qualifies as knowledge - to determine what are the accepted facts - wield the greatest social and political power. — Nancy Pearcey

When we bring the filmmaker, we bring somebody to help us elevate the material with those things, to help us do something different with all of those resources at their disposal. — Kevin Feige

As we peer into society's future, we
you and I, and our government
must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

Nowadays we live in a world where poor teenagers are willing to maim and murder for a pair of tennis shoes or a designer coat; this is not a consequence of poverty. In dire situations of poverty at earlier times in our nation's history, it would have been unthinkable to the poor to murder someone for a luxury item. While it was common for individuals to steal or attack in the interests of acquiring resources - money, food or something as simple as a winter coat to ward off the cold - there was no value system in place that made a life less important than the material desire for an inessential object. — Bell Hooks

For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence
on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match. — John F. Kennedy

No man should be viewed as having more to offer the world than another. We are all equals and every human being has something of value in their composition which makes them unique, just as every country has their own unique resources to share with the world. Never discount somebody based on material wealth, for true wealth is what cannot be seen. Never discount a country by what they can't provide your country, while their resources may benefit other lands in need. — Suzy Kassem

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

In the year 2006, a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get seventy-two virgins in Paradise. — Sam Harris

America has the laws and the material resources it takes to insure justice for all its people. What it lacks is the heart, the humanity ... — Shirley Chisholm

The life which is best for men, both separately, as individuals, and in the mass, as states, is the life which has virtue sufficiently supported by material resources to facilitate participation in the actions that virtue calls for. — Aristotle.

We must seek support in the moral values that have ensured the progress of our civilization. Honesty and hard work, responsibility and faith in our strength are bound to bring us success. There should be no place for despondency. The crisis can and must be fought by uniting our intellectual, spiritual and material resources. — Vladimir Putin

How do we negotiate between my history and yours? How would it be possible for us to recover our commonality, not the ambiguous imperial-humanist myth of those shard human (and indeed also most divine) attributes that are supposed to distinguish us absolutely from animals but, more significant, the imbrications of our various pasts and presents, the ineluctable relationships of shred and contested meanings, values, and material resources? It is necessary to assert our dense particularities, our lived and imagined differences; but can we afford to leave untheorized the question of how our differences are intertwined and, indeed, hierarchically organized? Could we, in other words, afford to have entirely different histories, to see ourselves living - and having lived - in entirely heterogenous and discrete spaces? — Satya P. Mohanty

Inordinate desire for material possessions can become an obsession that consumes our thoughts, drains our resources, and leads to unhappiness. — Joseph B. Wirthlin

[The] zero-sum caricature [applies] much more accurately to socialism, which stifles the creation of new wealth and thus fosters a dog-eat-dog struggle over existing material resources. — George Gilder

Science stands, a too competant servant, behind her wrangling underbred masters, holding out resources, devices, and remedies they are too stupid to use ... And on its material side, a modern Utopia must needs present these gifts as taken. — George Herbert

THE GREATEST GIFT One of the greatest gifts we can offer people is to embody nonattachment and nonfear. This is a true teaching, more precious than money or material resources. Many of us are very afraid, and this fear distorts our lives and makes us unhappy. We cling to objects and to people like a drowning person clings to a floating log. Practicing to realize nondiscrimination, to see the interconnectedness and impermanence of all things, and to share this wisdom with others, we are giving the gift of nonfear. Everything is impermanent. This moment passes. That person walks away. Happiness is still possible. — Thich Nhat Hanh

The capitalist mind perceives the world purely in terms of material resources to be used for its benefit, to increase productivity and profit without thought of long term consequence. If there is still a vague and oppressive sense of guilt, of wrongness and imbalance, this gnawing guilt spurs capitalism on to greater acts of consumption, more ... Read moreviolent attempts to subjugate nature, more totalizing efforts to create distractions. To the "rational materialist" mind, death is the end of everything; this thought feeds its rage against nature, which has placed it in this position of despair. — Daniel Pinchbeck

Income inequality has no necessary connection with poverty, the lack of material resources for a decent life, such as adequate food, shelter, and clothing. A society with great income inequality may have no poor people, and a society with no income inequality may have nothing but poor people. — Robert Higgs

Bare is back," says the Norse proverb, "without brother behind it;" and this is, by analogy, true of an elective magistracy. The hereditary ruler in any critical emergency may reckon on the inexhaustible resources of prestige, of sentiment, of superstition, of dependent interest, while the new man must slowly and painfully create all these out of the unwilling material around him, by superiority of character, by patient singleness of purpose, by sagacious presentiment of popular tendencies and instinctive sympathy with the national character. Mr. Lincoln's task was one of peculiar and exceptional difficulty. — James Russell Lowell

We spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that prestige and resources and belonging to elite institutions make us better off. We don't spend enough time thinking about the ways in which those kinds of material advantages limit our options. — Malcolm Gladwell

This is not a dictatorship, this is based upon scientific evidence to support a given project. If you want to put up a building, say half a mile high, the material has to be available. Using statistics is not a dictatorship. It's a method of getting the most from existing resources. — Jacque Fresco

If the individual could succeed in discovering through human experience the profound past, he, would more rapidly, reach the conclusion that all the opportunities that complement him in knowledge and health, come from Divine Kindness and, that most of the material resources that are at his disposition and desires proceed from injustice. — Chico Xavier

Decadence begins when men no longer find within themselves a reason to relate their lives to that of others and not when material resources run short. — Anonymous

The only way to survive in a community where movement was the norm and material accumulation impractical was to maintain a strong sense on tribal solidarity by evenly sharing all available resources. — Reza Aslan

We don't think a sustainable society need be stagnant, boring, uniform, or rigid. It need not be, and probably could not be, centrally controlled or authoritarian. It could be a world that has the time, the resources, and the will to correct its mistakes, to innovate, to preserve the fertility of its planetary ecosystems. It could focus on mindfully increasing quality of life rather than on mindlessly expanding material consumption and the physical capital stock. — Donella H. Meadows

Testimony in new age writing affirms the way in which embracing a love ethic transforms life for the good. Yet a lot of this information only reaches those of us who have class privilege. And often, individuals whose lives are rich in spiritual and material well-being, who have diverse friends from all walks of life who nurture their personal integrity, tell the rest of the world these things are impossible to come by. I am talking here about the many prophets of doom who tell us that racism will never end, sexism is here to stay the rich will never share their resources. We would all be surprised if we could enter their lives for a day. Much of what they are telling us cannot be had, they have. But in keeping with a capitalist-based notion of well-being, they really believe there is not enough to go around, that the good life can only be had by a few. — Bell Hooks

Without natural resources life itself is impossible. From birth to death, natural resources, transformed for human use, feed, clothe, shelter, and transport us. Upon them we depend for every material necessity, comfort, convenience, and protection in our lives. Without abundant resources prosperity is out of reach. — Gifford Pinchot

Find ways for people to shape their work and the company In addition to stripping leaders of the traditional tools of power and relying on facts to make decisions, we give Googlers uncommon freedom in shaping their own work and the company. Google isn't the first to do so. For over sixty-five years, 3M has offered its employees 15 percent of their time to explore: "A core belief of 3M is that creativity needs freedom. That's why, since about 1948, we've encouraged our employees to spend 15% of their working time on their own projects. To take our resources, to build up a unique team, and to follow their own insights in pursuit of problem-solving."103 Post-it Notes famously came out of this program, as did a clever abrasive material, Trizact, which somehow sharpens itself as it's used. — Anonymous

It's my goal to make a building as immaterial as possible. Architecture is a very material thing. It takes a lot of resources, so why not eliminate what you don't need as long as you're able to achieve the same result? — Helmut Jahn

Not only has this subject been long associated with the ideas of thinking men over the ages but its practical importance is attested to by the huge resources of men and material thrown into this type of work. — Robert Hofstadter

For living men, the units of time always have a value, which increases in ratio to the strength of the internal resources of the person living through them; but for us, hours, days, months spilled out sluggishly from the future into the past, always too slowly, a valueless and superfluous material, of which we sought to rid ourselves as soon as possible ... For us, history had stopped. — Primo Levi

We need to theorize the meaning of beauty in our lives so that we can educate for critical consciousness, talking through the issues: how we acquire and spend money, how we feel about beauty, what the place of beauty is in our lives when we lack material privilege and even basic resources for living, the meaning and significance of luxury, and the politics of envy. — Bell Hooks

If orange trees grew all over the country, you couldn't sell oranges. Do you understand that? So, all our decision making is based upon scarcity or the availability of resources. If we have a shortage of any kind of resource, we put all the labs to work on making substitute materials. People always worry about 'What if we run out of a certain material?', but we have enough technology today to make thousands of different substitutes. — Jacque Fresco

Instead of using their vastly increased material and technical resources to build a wonder-city, they built slums; and they thought it right and advisable to build slums because slums, on the test of private enterprise, "paid", whereas the wonder-city would, they thought, have been an act of foolish extravagance, which would, in the imbecile idiom of the financial fashion, have "mortgaged the future"; though how the construction to-day of great and glorious works can impoverish the future, no man can see until his mind is beset by false analogies from an irrelevant accountancy. — Richard Davenport-Hines

There are three reasons, ... apart from scientific considerations, mankind needs to travel in space. The first ... is garbage disposal; we need to transfer industrial processes into space so that the earth may remain a green and pleasant place for our grandchildren to live in. The second ... to escape material impoverishment: the resources of this planet are finite, and we shall not forego forever the abundance of solar energy and minerals and living space that are spread out all around us. The third ... our spiritual need for an open frontier. — Freeman Dyson

The most important step we can take toward Mars is to make significant progress on Earth. Even modest improvements in the social, economic, and political problems that our global civilization now faces could release enormous resources, both material and human, for other goals. — Carl Sagan

I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed by your bigness, or your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs true sublimity, and the terror of overhanging fate, is what are you going to do with all these things? — Thomas Huxley

Mating Strategy is influenced by the cardinal fact that women have more at stake in sexual activity than men, because of the limited age span in which they can reproduce and the heavy investment required of them with each child conceived. In courtship women consistently emphasize commitment of resources and material security. — E. O. Wilson

Now, after the material resources of the colonies have been looted, their spiritual and cultural resources are being transformed into commodities for the world market. — Maria Mies

There is a set of advantages that have to do with material resources, and there is a set that have to do with the absence of material resources- and the reason underdogs win as often as they do is that the latter is sometimes every bit the equal of the former. — Malcolm Gladwell

On this tenth day of June, nineteen hundred and forty, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor ... In our unity, in our American unity we will pursue two obvious and simultaneous courses; we will extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation, and at the same time we will harness and speed up the use of those resources in order that we ourselves in the Americas may have equipment and training equal to the task of any emergency and every defense. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

When you have a book as material as it is, it's a lot easier to create a character because you have so many resources to draw upon when acting. — Asa Butterfield

It is even more so when it comes to Iraq, which is a large Arab country with scientific, material, and human resources and is able to accomplish, at the least, what Lebanon accomplished, and more. — Bashar Al-Assad

If we want our nations to be truly great we must lay less emphasis on material wealth, natural resources or even human resources. — Sunday Adelaja

The societies of consumption and squandering of material resources are incompatible with the idea of economic growth and a clean planet. — Fidel Castro

And, in fact, you can find that the lack of basic resources, material resources, contributes to unhappiness, but the increase in material resources do not increase happiness. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Only a fighting nation can make itself responsible for world peace, and such a nation must organize its material resources and manpower with the highest possible degree of efficiency. — Chiang Kai-shek