Scarcity Quotes

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.

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.

Those who sign on and depart the system of anxious scarcity become the historymakers in the neighborhood.

As I celebrated what was right with the world, I began to build a vision of possibility, not scarcity. Possibility... always another right answer.

No complaint... is more common than that of a scarcity of money.

We live in an age of artificial scarcity, maintained by ignorance and fear.

You cannot advocate decency and ethics, you must design the conditions that eliminate the problems. In scarcity, people will tend to steal. If you make things available, people tend not to steal.

Time and space - time to be alone, space to move about - these may well become the great scarcities of tomorrow.

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.

In the ages marked by scarcity and want, may I myself appear as drink and sustenance.

And having looked to Government for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them.

If you are without bread, how much wisdom can you boast and of what real utility are your talents, if you cannot procure for yourselves and save against a day of scarcity those substances designed to sustain your natural lives?

There is only one important resource which has shown a trend of increasing scarcity rather than increasing abundance. That resource is the most important of all—human beings. . . . [An] increase in the price of peoples’ services is a clear indication that people are becoming more scarce even though there are more of us.

Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy.

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.

Abundance = choice = freedom. Scarcity = dependence = control.

In abundance prepare for scarcity.

The scarcity of the music not only makes the music itself enjoyable but it also gives the collector a strange sense of superiority.

The waste of plenty is the resource of scarcity.

The journey to financial freedom starts the MINUTE you decide you were destined for prosperity, not scarcity- for abundance, not lack. Isn't there a part of you that has always known that? Can you see yourself living a bounteous life- a life of more than enough? It only takes one minute to decide. Decide now.

But whilst there may be intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of land, there are no intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of capital.

There are a set of men who go about making purchases upon credit, and buying estates they have not wherewithal to pay for; and having done this, their next step is to fill the newspapers with paragraphs of the scarcity of money and the necessity of a paper emission, then to have a legal tender under the pretense of supporting its credit, and when out, to depreciate it as fast as they can, get a deal of it for a little price, and cheat their creditors; and this is the concise history of paper money schemes.

Advertising is utterly unprofitable, and I could prove it to you in one week. End an ad with an offer to pay five dollars to anyone who writes you that he read the ad through. The scarcity of replies will amaze you.

The simpler we make our lives, the more abundant they become. There is no scarcity except in our souls.

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.

Post-Scarcity Age, you don't pay for things. Abundance.

I think we have to be not so afraid of scarcity. We have to be willing to give away all things.

Discrimination is simply the act of choice. Scarcity requires us to choose; scarcity is the cause of discrimination!

I do think that the fear mentality - of scarcity - comes from within.

The scarcity trap captures this notion we see again and again in many domains. When people have very little, they undertake behaviors that maintain or reinforce their future disadvantage. If you have very little, you often behave in such a way so that youll have little in the future.

There is no intrinsic reason for the scarcity of capital.

The cause of poverty is not scarcity. It is fear and small thinking.

What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.

Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity. It becomes cheap as it becomes vulgar, and will no longer raise expectation or animate enterprise.

Farmers...can no longer keep up with rising demand; thus the outlook is for chronic scarcities and rising prices.

An abundance of some good things is perfectly compatible with the scarcity of others; that life is everywhere precarious, man everywhere small.

The scarcity of truth is atoned for by the abundance of affidavits; if a rumor be impugned, its veracity is easily strengthened by additional emphasis of affirmation, until at last "everybody says so," and then it is undeniable.

Since scarcity is the basic economic problem, if it does not exist then there is no reason for my economics course. Devoting time to the study of how people use limited resources to fulfill unlimited wants and needs should help us to discover how to best utilize the resources we have at our disposal.

It is more rewarding to be complicit with scarcity than excess.

Money is a way of creating scarcity.

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.

The gift economy represents a shift from consumption to contribution, transaction to trust, scarcity to abundance and isolation to community.

The first step toward discarding a scarcity mentality involves giving thanks for everything that you have.

In a highly critical, scarcity-based world, everyone's afraid to fail.

I think that the use of copyright is going to change dramatically. Part of it is economics. There is just going to be so much content out there - there's a scarcity of attention. Information consumes attention, and there's too much information.

Despite its growing scarcity and preciousness to life, ironically, water is also man’s most misgoverned, inefficiently allocated and profligately wasted natural resource.

Possessing utility, commodities derive their exchangeable value from two sources: from their scarcity, and from the quantity of labour required to obtain them.

A cardinal principle of the gospel is to prepare for the day of scarcity. Work, industry, frugality are part of the royal order of life.

If you're going to buy a real book, a paper book, there better be a good reason. Perhaps scarcity is one of those reasons.

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.