Quotes About Scarcity

Sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt

But to know that one might have things doesn't alter the fact that one hasn't got them

Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it.

When you own nothing, it's hard to believe you have anything to lose.

This is a silly place. Half the world has no clean water. The other half has so much that they pooh in it.

It's harder to appreciate what you don't have to look hard to find.

Strange," Phoebe said, looking at the lifeboats that hung just off the deck. "There are only sixteen boats. That's not nearly enough for everyone.

The God who impoverished himself is also the God of abundance, and somehow, perhaps at times nonsensically, Christians are called to live out of an ethic not of scarcity but of abundance—an abundance that extends both to the homeless neighbor and to the artist neighbor. . .

Their supplies consisted mainly of bread and wine, enough to last them the summer

nothing in the bag but a quart

Our lives are reduced to a tight circle. Each day revolves around what we can find to eat for the following day. And until it comes, we think about food. All day. All night. Hunger owns us.

I see so little of you these days; your presence is as rare as that of one's discarded mistress.

Last breath is rare, therefore expensive. However, we prefer to stay poor ... (Dernier soupir est rare, donc cher. - Pourtant, on préfère rester pauvre...)

The king who has the broad bean does not have one whole wafer. (Le roi qui a la fève - N'a la galette entière.)

Hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and started up from the filthy street that had no offal, among its refuse, of anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription on the baker's shelves, written in every small loaf of his scanty stock of bad bread;

When everything is subject to money, then the scarcity of money makes everything scarce, including the basis of human life and happiness. Such is the life of the slave—one whose actions are compelled by threat to survival. Perhaps the deepest indication of our slavery is the monetization of time.

Competition and the accumulation of more than one needs are the natural response to a perceived scarcity of resources. The obscene overconsumption and waste of our society arise from our poverty: the deficit of being that afflicts the discrete and separate self, the scarcity of money in an interest-based system, the poverty of relationship that comes from the severance of our ties to community and to nature, the relentless pressure to do anything, anything at all, to make a living.

Time is life. When we experience time as scarce, we experience life as short and poor.

The intuitions developed over centuries will be true no longer. No longer will greed, scarcity, the quantification and commoditization of all things, the "time preference" for immediate consumption, the discounting of the future for the sake of the present, the fundamental opposition between financial interest and the common good, or the equation of security with accumulation be axiomatic.

In any event, our governing paradigms, rooted in separation and scarcity, are constitutionally unable to encompass free-energy technologies, which are dismissed as impossible, fraudulent, or fantastical.

There is an infinite amount of suffering in the world. There is a distinctly finite amount of resources to deal with it. How do we decide who gets what? The dilemmas are agonizing. One man's treatment is another man's denial of treatment. To save X is to condemn Y.

Under civilization poverty is born of superabundance itself.

When everything is immediately available and infinitely reproducible, nothing is valuable.

Scarcity causes hardship, but affluence creates poverty.