Quotes About Resourcefulness

In the developing world, people often use quite basic technology. Many of the most imaginative schemes are using what we'd count as old tech.

If I'm not using something, I tend to sell it and move on, so I'm not too sentimental about hardware synths.

I try and get what I want using the strengths that the actors have.

I also taught myself how to blow glass using a propane torch from the hardware store and managed to make some elementary chemistry plumbing such as tees and small glass bulbs.

There's obviously some validity to it. But I think it also points out that you obviously can do it on your own because people have been doing it long before they had the stuff.

Europeans have never learned to survive in Australia or New Guinea without their inherited Eurasian technology.

Perhaps cold climates require one to be more technologically inventive to survive, because one must build a warm home and make warm clothing, whereas one can survive in the tropics with simpler housing and no clothing. Or the argument can be reversed to reach the same conclusion: the long winters at high latitudes leave people with much time in which to sit indoors and invent.

Scientists used to quote a phrase of Thomas Hobbes's in order to characterize the lifestyle of hunter-gatherers as "nasty, brutish, and short." They seemed to have to work hard, to be driven by the daily quest for food, often to be close to starvation, to lack such elementary material comforts as soft beds and adequate clothing, and to die young.

Quite a few inventions do conform to this commonsense view of necessity as invention's mother.

We require only a grenade launcher, six pounds of industrial-strength licorice, two spells of Class VIII complexity, a shipping container, a side of bacon, an automobile, several homing snails, a ladder, and two people to act as bait.

Why dig a hole in the garden, when potatoes grow wild in Finland?

Job hunting is a do-it-yourself activity. There is just no way around it.

Guerrilla marketers do not rely on the brute force of an outsized marketing budget. Instead, they rely on the brute force of a vivid imagination.

the essence of guerrilla marketing—the soul and the spirit of guerrilla marketing—is small business: companies with big dreams but tiny budgets.

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. Teach a man to create an artificial shortage of fish and he will eat steak.

Run if you can because, in spite of how it looks on television, it's hard to hit a moving target. If you can't run, fight and fight dirty. Go for the eyes. Think of every object around you as a weapon. Strike fast and hard when you get the chance because you'll only get one chance.

The obstinate miner of the void exploits his fertile mine

Congratulations. You have met your conscience. In my experience, the world is divided between those who have one and those who don't. And the ones with one are divided into those who will act on their conscience and those who won't. Those who will are, I'm afraid, the smallest category. They will *jeito*. It's Brazilian Portuguese. It means to find a way to get something done, no matter what the obstacles.

Just bring your wits. Sometimes that's the most effective weapon any of us has.

The sparks he made with just flint were not usually long-lived enough to make fire, anyway.

It didn't occur to him to attempt to make a fire with the sparks. But then he was not alone in a valley living on the bare edge of survival, he was usually around people who nearly always had a fire going.

poverty is the cause of many compromises.

Feelers grow when feelers are needed and claws when claws are needed and cunning when cunning is needed. . . .

People in Ember rarely threw anything away. They made the best possible use of what they had.