Quotes About Scarcity

I grew up in an era when money was not readily available. We were into the post-Depression years and World War II.

I remember World War II when there were very few books, very little paper available. For me to walk into a shop or look at a list and see anything that I want, or almost anything, is like a kind of miracle.

There are no more new worlds. The unoccupied arable lands of the earth are limited, and will soon be taken.

Water is not free anymore. Our resources were free at one time, but now they are not. Everything is getting controlled by big corporations. I'm most worried about this.

The Communist bloc of old was a study in the failure of failure. Losers in the Soviet economy were the people at the end of the long lines for consumer goods. Worse losers were the people who had spent hours getting to the head of the line, only to be told that the goods were unavailable.

When the well is dry, they know the worth of water.

Fortune gives too much to many, enough to none.

We have built a total of about 1250 of this aircraft, but only fifty were allowed to be used as fighters - as interceptors. And out of this fifty, there were never more than 25 operational. So we had only a very, very few.

Poverty and scarcity are actually very good for totalitarian societies. They maintain that sense of mobilization that's essential for totalitarian societies.

Elizabeth Bennett had been obliged, by the scarcity of gentlemen, to sit down for two dances; and during part of that time, Mr. Darcy had been standing near enough (some twenty yards away -- well within the reach of her extraordinary ears) for her to hear a conversation between him and Mr. Bingley...

You never know the worth of water until the well is dry.

Time is the least thing we have.

I can't think of a time in the history of man when food was in excess. We're dealing with the same old problems we've dealt with for 60,000 years.

With all the abundance we have of computers and computing, what is scarce is human attention and time.

As hunters and foragers of the dry savannah, our earliest forebears evolved a taste for important but scarce nutrients: salt and high-energy fats and sugars.

They had had about enough time to get their bearings and blow up one train when they ran out of food supplies.

Uniqueness is the commodity of glut.

Indeed, want and hunger were not the only reasons for fighting. Plenty and scarcity are relative not only to the number of mouths to be fed but also to the potentially ever-expanding and insatiable range of humans needs and desires. It is as if, paradoxically, human competition increases with abundance, as well as with deficiency, taking more complex forms and expressions, widening social gaps and enhancing stratification.

Hallie and I... were all there was. The image in the mirror that proves you are still here. We had exactly one sister apiece. We grew up knowing the simple arithmetic of scarcity: A sister is more precious than an eye.

In a world of scarcity, opportunities don't present themselves in bunches, and the decisions people face are between approach and avoidance, acceptance or rejection.

One way of achieving this goal is by keeping wonderful experiences rare. No matter what you can afford, save great wine for special occasions.

According to standard economic assumptions, the only opportunity costs that should figure into a decision are the ones associated with the next-best alternative.

For me enough means not enough

Most of us approach situations with the win-lose mentality. "Winning" means somebody else loses. We're scripted with a scarcity mentality by win-lose athletics, academic distribution curves, and forced ranking systems. We look at life through the glasses of win-lose, and if we fail to develop self-awareness, we spend our lives competing for "dimes" instead of cooperating for "dollars.