Quotes About Resources

A civilization has the ethics it can afford

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.

Baldaya sailed farther south and collected thousands of sealskins;

The food represented a considerable investment: 1,252,909 maravedís, nearly as much as the cost of the entire fleet

the House of Fugger, for which he worked, had enough money to finance ten expeditions, or more;

Santiago's crew soon discovered that food was even more plentiful around the Santa Cruz River

more than enough, he calculated, to carry them through the strait and to the Moluccas.

could provide abundant food, and their thick, glossy, silvery-gray pelts a sorely needed source of warmth in these frigid latitudes.

Only Seville was capable of providing Magellan with the technology, the labor, and the financial resources

whose lives depended on the food acquired in the Canaries.

To the degree that our biologically based core needs are met early in life, we develop core capacities that allow us to recognize and meet these needs as adults (Table I.1). Being attuned to these five basic needs and capacities means that we are connected to our deepest resources and vitality.

Ronald Steel noted, "Unlike Rome, we have not exploited our empire. On the contrary, our empire has exploited us, making enormous drains on our resources and energies.

How slender is the accommodation which nature has provided for man.

food and water can be thought of as a flow—or, more precisely, a critical-zone flow, a current with a volume that must be maintained. By contrast, fossil fuels are like a stock, a fixed amount of a good. Few dispute that the flow of food and water could be interrupted, with terrible effects. But people have disagreed for a century and a half—since the days of Pithole—about whether the world has an adequate stock of fossil fuels.

There was something very comfortable in having plenty of stationery.

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.

Friend, God is the same today as He was in Bible times, and He works through everything that touches your life for your good. Therefore, no matter how dire your circumstances may appear—or how far He stretches the last of your resources—trust Him to supply your needs.

The electricity you use at home each day requires 250 gallons of water per person, not just more than the actual water you use at home in the kitchen and the bathroom but two-and-a-half times more.

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.

Principled Entrepreneurship™—creating superior value for our customers while consuming fewer resources and always acting lawfully and with integrity. Good profit comes from making a contribution in society—not from corporate welfare or other ways of taking advantage of people.

By "good profit," I don't mean high margins or high return on capital, or lots of profit by just any means. What I consider to be good profit comes from Principled Entrepreneurship™—creating superior value for our customers while consuming fewer resources and always acting lawfully and with integrity. Good profit comes from making a contribution in society—not from corporate welfare or other ways of taking advantage of people.

The role of business in society is to help people improve their lives by providing products and services they value more highly than their alternatives, and to do so while consuming fewer resources.

4. Principled Entrepreneurship: This principle—so central to our culture that we had it trademarked—is defined as "maximizing the long-term profitability of the business by creating superior value for our customers while consuming fewer resources and always acting lawfully and with integrity." Creating value for society requires Principled Entrepreneurship—not political or other forms of entrepreneurship, such as corporate welfare or fraud.

A library card is a credit card.