Scarcity Quotes

1. "What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity."
Author: Adam Gopnik

2. "No complaint... is more common than that of a scarcity of money."
Author: Adam Smith

3. "Rising demand for oil exposed Europe, and later America, to oil shocks - serious interruptions in supply. Like a pebble tossed into a pond, an oil shock creats ripples, or effects, felt everywhere.Oil shocks have two causes. The first is natural, because existing oil fields may not yield enough to satisfy demand. Scarcity results in higher prices for oil products, reducing our standard of living. Natural scarcity was not a problem in the world's major producing areas until recently.The second cause of oil shocks is political. Political shocks happen when governments of oil-producing countries reduce or halt supply to gain the upper hand in dealings with other governments. This is the case in the Middle East, where oil has often mixed with politics, religion, and blood. The reasons for this have shaped the history of recent times."
Author: Albert Marrin

4. "...there is no resistance to the idea that what is foreign can be known. Can be understood. Can be held in the embrace of love that holds the Universe. Given this Earth on which we live and grow, given its beauty and generosity, its majesty and comfort, how can one doubt that one is loved? That in fact there is an abundance, not a scarcity of love? It is all anyone ever wants, really, I believe, and it is all around us as we starve."
Author: Alice Walker

5. "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."
Author: Barbara Kingsolver

6. "After doing this work or the past twelve years and watching scarcity ride roughshod over our families, organizations, and communities, I'd say the one thing we have in common is that we're sick of feeling afraid. we want to dare greatly. We're tired of the national conversation centering on "What should we fear" and "Who should we blame?" We all want to be brave."
Author: Brené Brown

7. "Joy and gratitude can be very vulnerable and intense experiences. We are an anxious people and many of us have very little tolerance for vulnerability. Our anxiety and fear can manifest as scarcity. We think to ourselves: I'm not going to allow myself to feel this joy because I know it won't last. Acknowledging how grateful I am is an invitation for disaster. I'd rather not be joyful than have to wait for the other shoe to drop."
Author: Brené Brown

8. "When we feel good about the choices we're making and when we're engaging with the world from a place of worthiness rather than scarcity, we feel no need to judge and attack."
Author: Brené Brown

9. "I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir."
Author: Carl Sagan

10. "Chronic malnutrition, or the lack of proper nutrition over time directly contributes to three times as many child deaths as food scarcity. Yet surprisingly, you don't really hear about this hidden crisis through the morning news, Twitter or headlines of major newspapers."
Author: Cat Cora

11. "Free is really, you know, the gift of Silicon Valley to the world. It's an economic force, it's a technical force. It's a deflationary force, if not handled right. It is abundance, as opposed to scarcity."
Author: Chris Anderson

12. "Gold and silver, like other commodities, have an intrinsic value, which is not arbitrary, but is dependent on their scarcity, the quantity of labour bestowed in procuring them, and the value of the capital employed in the mines which produce them."
Author: David Ricardo

13. "The ancient feud between cat and dog is not forgotten in the north, for the Lynx is the deadly foe of the Fox and habitually kills it when there is soft snow and scarcity of easier prey."
Author: Ernest Thompson Seton

14. "It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another."
Author: George Orwell

15. "Work—especially the sort of work that gets your hands dirty and that brands you as a member of the working class—no longer seems germane to our novelists' apprenticeships and, not coincidentally, is no longer easy to find in the fiction they produce. Whether one finds this scarcity something to worry about or simply a fact to be noted probably says a lot about one's class origins and prejudices."
Author: Gerald Howard

16. "No fossil is buried with its birth certificate. That, and the scarcity of fossils, means that it is effectively impossible to link fossils into chains of cause and effect in any valid way... To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific."
Author: Henry Gee

17. "Malthus has been buried many times, and Malthusian scarcity with him. But as Garrett Hardin remarked, anyone who has to be reburied so often cannot be entirely dead."
Author: Herman E. Daly

18. "There has seldom if ever a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this simple fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots."
Author: Iain Banks

19. "Life of scarcity teaches creativity."
Author: Jag Randhawa

20. "I am the minister in The Ministry of Scarcity, but I'm not ordained because they were out of the paper they use to print the certificates on. Still, the title alone carries some weight (2.2 pounds)."
Author: Jarod Kintz

21. "This practically unlimited supply of advertisers in a fluid marketplace appears to be a new economic model that may insulate Google from some of the dynamics of an economy built on mass and scarcity. Google has its own economy."
Author: Jeff Jarvis

22. "Time is the scarcity, and it's the commodity we can't create any more of."
Author: Jim Mitchell

23. "The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich."
Author: John Berger

24. "Today, for the mass of humanity, science and technology embody 'miracle, mystery, and authority'. Science promises that the most ancient human fantasies will at last be realized. Sickness and ageing will be abolished; scarcity and poverty will be no more; the species will become immortal. Like Christianity in the past, the modern cult of science lives on the hope of miracles. But to think that science can transform the human lot is to believe in magic. Time retorts to the illusions of humanism with the reality: frail, deranged, undelivered humanity. Even as it enables poverty to be diminished and sickness to be alleviated, science will be used to refine tyranny and perfect the art of war."
Author: John Nicholas Gray

25. "...The real cause of hunger is a scarcity of justice, not a scarcity of food. Enough grain is squandered every day in raising American livestock for meat to provide every human being on earth with two loaves of bread."
Author: John Robbins

26. "In the disturbances caused by scarcity of food, the mob goes in search of bread, and the means it employs is generally to wreck the bakeries. This may serve as a symbol of the attitude adopted, on a greater and more complicated scale, by the masses of today towards the civilization by which they are supported … Civilization is not "just here," it is not self-supporting."
Author: José Ortega Y Gasset

27. "But despite the scarcity of confrontation with whites in our neighborhood, race and racism permeated every aspect of our lives. Our parents taught us that in order to succeed, we 'had to be twice as good as white folks.' We were constantly being prepared to enter a world dominated by whites."
Author: Junius Williams

28. "Chemistry itself knows altogether too well that - given the real fear that the scarcity of global resources and energy might threaten the unity of mankind - chemistry is in a position to make a contribution towards securing a true peace on earth."
Author: Kenichi Fukui

29. "...some evidence seems to exist that an idea prevailed that in the fairy sphere there is a reversal of the seasons, our winter being their summer. Some such belief seems to have been known to Robert Kirk, for he tells us that 'when we have plenty they [the fairies] have scarcity at their homes.' In respect of the Irish fairies they seem to have changed their residences twice a year: in May, when the ancient Irish "flitted" from their winter houses to summer pastures, and in November, when they quitted these temporary quarters."
Author: Lewis Spence

30. "That was the thing about luck, its laws were those of scarcity."
Author: Lily Gardner

31. "Most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise."
Author: Maya Angelou

32. "Don't become a random photograph in the eyes of friends, and even your enemies, for each glance at your face will cause a declination of value and reputation. Create value, through scarcity."
Author: Michael Bassey Johnson

33. "...I take as a point of departure the possibility and desirability of a fundamentally different form of society--call it communism, if you will--in which men and women, freed from the pressures of scarcity and from the insecurity of everyday existence under capitalism, shape their own lives. Collectively they decide who, how, when, and what shall be produced."
Author: Michael Burawoy

34. "We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our children.' But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared."
Author: Michael Chabon

35. "There is more ado to interpret interpretations than to interpret things, and more books upon books than upon any other subject; we do nothing but comment upon one another. Every place swarms with commentaries; of authors there is great scarcity."
Author: Michel De Montaigne

36. "It's true: greed has had a very bad press. I frankly don't see anything wrong with greed. I think that the people who are always attacking greed would be more consistent with their position if they refused their next salary increase. I don't see even the most Left-Wing scholar in this country scornfully burning his salary check. In other words, "greed" simply means that you are trying to relieve the nature given scarcity that man was born with. Greed will continue until the Garden of Eden arrives, when everything is superabundant, and we don't have to worry about economics at all. We haven't of course reached that point yet; we haven't reached the point where everybody is burning his salary increases, or salary checks in general."
Author: Murray N. Rothbard

37. "The problem in the 19th century with information was that we lived in a culture of information scarcity, and so humanity addressed that problem beginning with photography and telegraphy and the - in the 1840s. We tried to solve the problem of overcoming the limitations of space, time, and form."
Author: Neil Postman

38. "Money is a way of creating scarcity."
Author: Peter Coyote

39. "Every dish in the ferial cuisine, however, provides a double or treble delight: Not only is the body nourished and the palate pleased, the mind is intrigued by the triumph of ingenuity over scarcity - by the making of slight materials into a considerable matter. A man can do worse than to be poor. He can miss altogether the sight of the greatness of small things."
Author: Robert Farrar Capon

40. "In a time when nothing is more certain than change, the commitment of two people to one another has become difficult and rare. Yet, by its scarcity, the beauty and value of this exchange have only been enhanced."
Author: Robert Sexton

41. "The Dip creates scarcity; scarcity creates value"
Author: Seth Godin

42. "I think we have to be not so afraid of scarcity. We have to be willing to give away all things."
Author: Sharon Stone

43. "By meditating, we´re learning to disengage ourselves from habitual clinging and disperse the defilements and obscurations that hinder our capacity to serve others, such as illusory feelings of scarcity and fears of deprivation. We gradually learn to be more conscious and make better choices. We develop simplicity instead of comlexity, open-mindedness instead of narrow-mindedness, flexibility rather than rigidity. We feel ourselves to be more available to others and to give more generously of ourselves."
Author: Surya Das

44. "The folly of men has enhanced the value of gold and silver because of their scarcity; whereas, on the contrary, it is their opinion that Nature, as an indulgent parent, has freely given us all the best things in great abundance, such as water and earth, but has laid up and hid from us the things that are vain and useless."
Author: Thomas More

45. "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics."
Author: Thomas Sowell

46. "Science blasphemed when tries to eliminate scarcity in economy."
Author: Toba Beta

47. "A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That's why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet."
Author: Truman Capote

48. "It appears from Mr. Smith's account that there is no scarcity of buffalo as he penetrated the country."
Author: William Henry Ashley

49. "I love nature dearly and all creatures that contribute to make it what it is. I see the beauty in all expressions of life, and I see how blind so many of us still are. Our planet is remarkably abundant and there's more than enough for us all.It is greed and shortsightedness that create the illusion of scarcity."
Author: Yossi Ghinsberg

50. "Feeling at home anywhere on earth, and a foreigner even in the country where I was born, I consider myself an earthling, a citizen of the world.I love nature dearly and all creatures that contribute to make it what it is. I see the beauty in all expressions of life, and I see how blind so many of us still are. Our planet is remarkably abundant and there's more than enough for us all.It is greed and shortsightedness that create the illusion of scarcity. I have lived through tremendous adventures and survived only because other people risked their lives for me. Realising how interconnected and interdependent we all are, I am neither shy or embarrassed when it is time for me lean on another to ask for help. And when I have the opportunity to help another, I view it as my duty and privilege."
Author: Yossi Ghinsberg

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