Quotes & Sayings About Scarce Resources

Putting together a sustainable budget requires that we all work together, that we focus our scarce resources on key priorities, and that we strengthen our capacity to deliver the best product we can for the American people. And that takes money. — Roy Blunt

The most scarce resource we have these days is the idea. — DJ Spooky

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

When you think of all the conflicts we have - whether those conflicts are local, whether they are regional or global - these conflicts are often over the management, the distribution of resources. If these resources are very valuable, if these resources are scarce, if these resources are degraded, there is going to be competition. — Wangari Maathai

Instead of focusing on getting more resources, tipping point leaders concentrate on multiplying the value of the resources they have. When it comes to scarce resources, there are three factors of disproportionate influence that executives can leverage to dramatically free resources, on the one hand, and multiply the value of resources, on the other. These are hot spots, cold spots, and horse trading. Hot spots are activities that have low resource input but high potential performance gains. In contrast, cold spots are activities that have high resource input but low performance impact. In every organization, hot spots and cold spots typically abound. Horse trading involves trading your unit's excess resources in one area for another unit's excess resources to fill remaining resource gaps. By learning to use their current resources right, companies often find they can tip the resource hurdle outright. What — W.Chan Kim

everything in the area of law enforcement, including criminal law, has at one time or another been handled by the private sector quite adequately, and in some places it's occurring even today. The second reason is that in fact the law and law enforcement are not public goods. Public goods are supposed to be goods that everyone has equal access to and that the private sector will not provide. As I said, the private sector does provide these things, and furthermore the idea of equal access to justice is just not true. We have scarce resources being used in law enforcement and adjudication and prosecution and in punishment, and so the use of these resources for one thing means they are not being effectively used for something else. There are tradeoffs. The vast majority of crimes that are reported to police are never resolved. The vast majority of crimes committed are never reported to police. So the belief that law and law enforcement are public goods simply doesn't stand up to reality. — Anonymous

Viewed abstractly, systems analysis implies rigorous thinking, hopefully quantitative, regarding the gains and the resource-expenditures involved in a particular course of action -- to insure that scarce resources are employed productively rather than wastefully. — James R. Schlesinger

Faith drives a wedge between ethics and suffering. Where certain actions cause no suffering at all, religious dogmatists still maintain that they are evil and worthy of punishment ... And yet, where suffering and death are found in abundance their causes are often deemed to be good ... This inversion of priorities not only victimizes innocent people and squanders scarce resources; it completely falsifies our ethics. — Sam Harris

It's not that racism doesn't exist. Lots of people in New York, and elsewhere, hate because of color and gender, religion and national origin. It's just that I rarely worry about those things because there's a real world underneath all that nonsense; a world that demands my attention almost every second of the day.
Racism is a luxury in a world where resources are scarce, where economic competition is an armed sport, in a world where even the atmosphere is plotting against you. In an arena like that racism is more of a halftime entertainment, a favorite sitcom when the day is done. — Walter Mosley

It's well-known that people don't respond to scarce resources necessarily in what we might consider a positive light. — Jane Poynter

When a resource is scarce, you increase its yield. — Peter Drucker

Economics is the study of how society manages its scarce resources. — Greg Mankiw

The career world is like an ecological system: People occupy particular fields within which they must compete for resources and survival. The more people there are crowded into a space, the harder it becomes to thrive there. Working in such a field will tend to wear you out as you struggle to get attention, to play the political games, to win scarce resources for yourself. You spend so much time at these games that you have little time left over for true mastery. You are seduced into such fields because you see others there making a living, treading the familiar path. You are not aware of how difficult such a life can be. — Robert Greene

Where resources are plentiful (i.e. no constraints), you will find very little creativity. Where resources are scarce (i.e. many constraints), you will find an abundance of creativity. — Andy Murray

Profit is vital to human well-being. Profit is the payment to entrepreneurs just as wages are payments to labor, interest to capital and rent to land. In order to earn profits in free markets, entrepreneurs must identify and satisfy human wants and do so in a way that economizes on society's scarce resources. — Walter E. Williams

Busy people all make the same mistake: they assume they are short on time, which of course, they are. But time is not their only scarce resource. They are also short on bandwidth. By bandwidth I mean basic cognitive resources - psychologists call them working memory and executive control - that we use in nearly every activity. — Sendhil Mullainathan

In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable. — Peter Thiel

As we are brought into God's extraordinary kingdom through ordinary means, we are remade, no longer fashioned as competitors for commodities in a world of scarce resources, but as co-sharers with Christ in the circulation of gifts that flows outward from its source without running out. — Michael Horton

If we do not change our negative habits toward climate change, we can count on worldwide disruptions in food production, resulting in mass migration, refugee crises and increased conflict over scarce natural resources like water and farm land. This is a recipe for major security problems. — Michael Franti

They are a testament not only to the Afghans' hunger for literacy, but also to their willingness to pour scarce resources into this effort, even during a time of war. I have seen children studying in classrooms set up inside animal sheds, windowless basements, garages, and even an abandoned public toilet. We ourselves have run schools out of refugee tents, shipping containers, and the shells of bombed-out Soviet armored personnel carriers. The thirst for education over there is limitless. The Afghans want their children to go to school because literacy represents what neither we not anyone else has so far managed to offer them: hope, progress, and the possibility of controlling their own destiny. — Greg Mortenson

An open, competitive, and liberalized financial market can effectively allocate scarce resources in a manner that promotes stability and prosperity far better than governmental intervention. — Henry Paulson

Development is a fundamental part of our national security. It is extreme poverty- the realities of access to water and food- which create the long-term drivers of our insecurity. Most wars are fought over scarce resources and that is going to accelerate in the future. — Rajiv Shah

If the people are led to believe that scarce resources are best channeled in a direction that producers and consumers would not choose on their own, the result must necessarily be central planning. — Llewellyn Rockwell

The feeling of being in competition for scarce resources has powerfully motivating properties. — Robert B. Cialdini

In the meantime, we see there are charities that spend much of their scarce resources that should be going directly to the children to overcome this gulf that separates them from both the donors and the needy. — Dana Rohrabacher

The industrial civilisation is based on the consumption of energy resources that are inherently limited in quantity and that are about to become scarce. When they do, competition for what remains will trigger dramatic economic and geopolitical events; in the end, it may be impossible for even a single nation to sustain industrialism as we have know it in the twentieth century. — Richard Heinberg

Literature is the voice of the age and the state; the character, energy, and resources of the country are reflected and imaged forth in the conceptions of its great minds; they are organs of the time; they speak not their own language, they scarce think their own thoughts; but under an impulse like the prophetic enthusiasm of old, they must feel and utter the sentiments which society inspires. — Edward Everett

The most abundant resources that we possess amongst the 1.5 million nonprofits in the United States are passion and knowledge, yet our most scarce resource is collaboration. — Adam Braun

Using the latest in science and technology to shatter today's economic paradigm of 'insatiable individuals competing for scarce resources,' Planetary Citizenship brings us full circle to the ancient wisdom of indigenous peoples and the sacredness of creation. — Rebecca Adamson

Our supplies of natural resources are not finite in any economic sense. Nor does past experience give reason to expect natural resources to become more scarce. Rather, if history is any guide, natural resources will progressively become less costly, hence less scarce, and will constitute a smaller proportion of our expenses in future years. — Julian Simon

It is in fact necessary to reduce CO2 emissions. There is no reason why we shouldn't spend our vacations on (the North Sea island of) Sylt instead of in the Seychelles, or drive more economical cars - for the sake of preserving increasingly scarce resources if nothing else. But that won't enable us to stop climate change. As long as China, India and the United States continue the way they have been, what we Germans do is more or less irrelevant. — Hans Von Storch

Meanwhile, time is one of our most scarce resources. At the moment, you are reading instead of working, playing with the dog, applying to law school, shopping for groceries, or having sex. Life is about trade-offs, and so is economics. — Charles Wheelan

One of the most important features of our economic resources is their scarcity: land, labor, and capital goods factors are all scarce, and may all be put to various possible uses. The free market uses them 'productively' because the producers are guided, on the market, to produce what the consumers most need: automobiles, for example, rather than buggies. — Murray Rothbard

The current model is global suicide. We need a revolution. Revolutionary thinking. Revolutionary action. Natural resources are becoming more and more scarce. — Ban Ki-moon

To say that spiritual engagement somehow causes humanity to become violent is to ignore the obvious pressures on all human societies throughout history to accrue scarce resources, to shore up status and power, and to impose order on chaos. If anything, every new religion emerged at least in part as a protest against violence and oppression. — Anonymous

Desert strategies are useful: In times of drought, pull your resources inward; when water is scarce, find moisture in seeds; to stay strong and supple, send a taproot down deep; run when required, hide when necessary; when hot go underground; do not fear darkness, it's where one comes alive. — Terry Tempest Williams

It is terrible that we all die and lose everything we love; it is doubly terrible that so many human beings suffer needlessly while alive. That so much of this suffering can be directly attributed to religion - to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious delusions and religious diversions of scarce resources - is what makes atheism a moral and intellectual necessity. — Sam Harris

Many governments are giving subsidies to fossil fuel production and consumption that encourage greenhouse gas emissions, at the same time as they are spending on projects to promote clean energy. This is a wasteful use of scarce budget resources. — Jose Angel Gurria

The definition of the problem, rather than its solution, will be the scarce resource in the future. — Esther Dyson

The reality is we live in a world of scarce resources in this veil of tears, as Tony Abbott often describes the world, we have to be real, we have to accept that we can't spend as much money on everything as we would like and so we have chosen to re prioritise, to change spending. — Chris Bowen

Conflicts are never caused in any simple way by identity, culture or economics. Where resources are scarce, or there are strong historical memories of conflict, small events are more likely to inflame passions. — Geoff Mulgan

Investing scarce resources in large-scale public projects and capital goods does increase output, but it does not contribute to economic progress if these investments do not produce things people value. — Christopher J. Coyne

If economies collapse and lawlessness rules and resources are scarce, many people who claim with their mouths that they follow Jesus ... will abandon him with their lives. — Brandon Andress

Textbooks describe economics as the study of the allocation of scarce resources. That definition may be the 'what,' but it certainly is not the 'why.' — Ben Bernanke

We must recognize that only scarce resources are ownable; second, that the body is a type of scarce resource; third, that the mode of acquiring title to external objects is different from the basis of ownership of one's own body. — Stephan Kinsella

According to Ommaney, prior to their departure Zinat Mahal had been squabbling loudly with Jawan Bakht after the latter had fallen in love with one of his father's harem women. He also began using the family's now scarce financial resources to bribe the guards to bring him bottles of porter: 'What an instance of the state of morals and domestic economy of Ex-Royalty,' wrote a disapproving Ommaney to Saunders. 'Mother and son at enmity, the son trying to form a connection with his father's concubine, and setting at nought the precepts of his religion, buying from, and drinking, the liquor of an infidel. — William Dalrymple

I'm a capitalist by conviction and profession. I believe the best economic system is one that rewards entrepreneurship and risk-taking, maximizes customer choice, uses markets to allocate scarce resources and minimizes the regulatory burden on business. — Gary Hamel

Is not this home, this biosphere where cunning and violence is rewarded, resources are frighteningly scarce and security never guaranteed, a nightmarish cage where every inmate is contracted by birth to prey upon the other in order to steal the proteins and fats and sugars and minerals they need just to stay alive one more day in what amounts to a daily apocalypse of obliged bloodletting? — John Zande

We can no longer afford to consider air and water common property, free to be abused by anyone without regard to the consequences. Instead, we should begin now to treat them as scarce resources, which we are no more free to contaminate than we are free to throw garbage into our neighbor's yard. — Richard M. Nixon