Scarcity Quotes

“The desert and the ocean are realms of desolation on the surface.

The desert is a place of bones, where the innards are turned out, to desiccate into dust.

The ocean is a place of skin, rich outer membranes hiding thick juicy insides, laden with the soup of being.

Inside out and outside in. These are worlds of things that implode or explode, and the only catalyst that determines the direction of eco-movement is the balance of water.

Both worlds are deceptive, dangerous. Both, seething with hidden life.

The only veil that stands between perception of what is underneath the desolate surface is your courage.

Dare to breach the surface and sink.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“If somebody never gets enough of you, they will always want more”
― Ashly Lorenzana

“Our entire system, in an economic sense, is based on restriction. Scarcity and inefficiency are the movers of money; the more there is of any resource the less you can charge for it. The more problems there are, the more opportunities there are to make money.

This reality is a social disease, for people can actually gain off the misery of others and the destruction of the environment. Efficiency, abundance and sustainability are enemies of our economic structure, for they are inverse to the mechanics required to perpetuate consumption.

This is profoundly critical to understand, for once you put this together you begin to see that the one billion people currently starving on this planet, the endless slums of the poor and all the horrors of a culture due to poverty and pravity are not natural phenomenon due to some natural human order or lack of earthly resources. They are products of the creation, perpetuation and preservation of artificial scarcity and inefficiency.”
― Peter Joseph

“The world has a very serious problem, my friend' Shiva went on. 'Poor children still die by their millions. Westerners and the global rich -- like me -- live in post-scarcity society, while a billion people struggle to get enough to eat. And we're pushing the planet towards a tipping point, where the corals die and the forests burn and life becomes much, much harder. We have the resources to solve those problems, even now, but politics and economics and nationalism all get in the way. If we could access all those minds, though...”
― Ramez Naam, Crux

“A river of material flows through us. When we share our works and our ideas, they are replenished. If we block the flow by holding them all inside, the river cannot run and new ideas are slow to appear.

In the abundant mindset, the river never runs dry. Ideas are always coming through. And an artist is free to release them with the faith that more will arrive.

If we live in a mindset of scarcity, we hoard great ideas.”
― Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

“From our immersion in scarcity arise the habits of scarcity. From the scarcity of time arises the habit of hurrying. From the scarcity of money comes the habit of greed. From the scarcity of attention comes the habit of showing off. From the scarcity of meaningful labor comes the habit of laziness. From the scarcity of unconditional acceptance comes the habit of manipulation.”
― Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

“...there's not enough of anything to go around except people and death.”
― Saša Stanišić, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

“Men had suddenly become a scarce commodity, if not quite as sought after as rice.”
― John Burnham Schwartz, The Commoner

“Scarcity is an illusion that results from inefficient systems.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

“Do you enter a situation and notice all that is right with it or all that is wrong? Your answer will have a huge effect on how you raise your children. It also reflects the degree to which there is an emptiness inside you, where your essence failed to flourish.”
― Shefali Tsabary, The Awakened Family: A Revolution in Parenting

“Stressful conditions tax our cognitive bandwidth, reducing our ability to think clearly and exercise executive control. Stress also hurts our ability to make rational long-term decisions that require delayed gratification. Living in a community in which we feel a sense of trust and support acts as a buffer against the detrimental impact of scarcity. However, a higher level of income inequality in our community can fray our sense of social trust.”
― Dan Ariely, Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things

“Science blasphemed when tries to eliminate scarcity in economy.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“You will continue in poverty and financial scarcity until you understand the principles of financial wealth creation, then you can start generating financial success and make those laws work for you not against you”
― Dr. Lucas D. Shallua

“Life is interesting when you don't have money. Scarcity of anything teaches how to survive under extreme circumstances.”
― Sarvesh Jain

“The world has takers and givers, the moment you decide to be a taker you will always be in want, scarcity and on downward spiral. Givers are always watered and never wither even in the dry season.”
― Dr. Lucas D. Shallua

“Scarcity makes desire, yes, but scant makes desperation, and satisfaction makes you lazy.”
― Ian Kirkpatrick, Boom, Boom, Boom

“To economists, everything revolves around scarcity - after all, even the biggest spenders can't buy everything. However, the perception of scarcity is not ubiquitous. An empty schedule feels different than a jam-packed workday. And that's not some harmless little feeling. Scarcity impinges on your mind. People behave differently when they perceive a thing to be scarce.
What that thing is doesn't much matter; whether it's too little time, money, friendship, food - it all contributes to experience a "scarcity mentality". And this has benefits. People who experience a sense of scarcity are good at managing their short-term problems. Poor people have an incredible ability - in the short term - to make ends meet, the same way that overworked CEOs can power through to close a deal.
Despite all this, the drawbacks of a "scarcity mentality" are greater than the benefits. Scarcity narrows your focus to your immediate lack, to the meeting that's starting in five minutes or the bills that need to be paid tomorrow. The long-term perspective goes out of the window. "Scarcity consumes you", Shafir explains. "You're less able to focus on other things that are also important to you."
...
There's a key distinction though between people with busy lives and those living in poverty: You can't take a break from poverty.”
― Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

“Human beings, the ultimate seekers, have
responded too well to the challenge of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain.
As a result, we’ve transformed the world from a place of scarcity to a place
of overwhelming abundance.”
― Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

“So today I'm recalling the utility, the need, of my own essayettes to emerge from such dailiness, and in that way to be a practice of witnessing one's delight, of being in and with one's delight, daily, which actually requires vigilance. It also requires faith that delight will be with you daily, that you needn't hoard it. No scarcity of delight.”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

“The early socialists seem to have understood the slogan 'To each according to his needs' in a limited sense: they meant that people should not have to suffer cold and hunger or spend their lives staving off destitution. Marx, however, and many Marxists after him, imagined that under socialism all scarcity would come to an end. It was possible to entertain this hope in the ultra-sanguine form that all wants would be satisfied, as though every human being had a magic ring or obedient jinn at his disposal. But, since this could hardly be taken seriously, Marxists who considered the question decided, with a fair degree of support from Marx's works, that Communism would ensure the satisfaction of 'true' or 'genuine' needs consonant with human nature, but not whims or desires of all kinds. This, however, gave rise to a problem which no one answered clearly: who is to decide what needs are 'genuine', and by what criteria? If every man is to judge this for himself, then all needs are equally genuine provided they are actually, subjectively felt, and there is no room for any distinction. If, on the other hand, it is the state which decides, then the greatest emancipation in history consists in a system of universal rationing.”
― Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown

“In one of his later volumes, Earth, book XXXV, Pliny tells the story of a goldsmith who brought an unusual dinner plate to the court of Emperor Tiberius.

The plate was a stunner, made from a new metal, very light, shiny, almost as bright as silver. The goldsmith claimed he’d extracted it from plain clay, using a secret technique, the formula known only to himself and the gods. Tiberius, though, was a little concerned. The emperor was one of Rome’s great generals, a warmonger who conquered most of what is now Europe and amassed a fortune of gold and silver along the way. He was also a financial expert who knew the value of his treasure would seriously decline if people suddenly had access to a shiny new metal rarer than gold. “Therefore,” recounts Pliny, “instead of giving the goldsmith the regard expected, he ordered him to be beheaded.”

This shiny new metal was aluminum, and that beheading marked its loss to the world for nearly two millennia. It next reappeared during the early 1800s but was still rare enough to be considered the most valuable metal in the world. Napoléon III himself threw a banquet for the king of Siam where the honored guests were given aluminum utensils, while the others had to make do with gold.”
― Peter H. Diamandis, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think

“Strategy is scarcity’s child and to have a strategy, rather than vague aspirations, is to choose one path and eschew others. There is difficult psychological, political, and organizational work in saying “no” to whole worlds of hopes, dreams, and aspirations.”
― Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy, Playing to Win [Hardcover] 2 Books Collection Set

“Regurgitating stories of suffering seems to be part of the process to access any kind of support, whether it be a bursary, deadline extension, therapy, social housing it asylum. I want no longer to see this as natural, as just how things are.”
― Pear Nuallak, Pearls from Their Mouth

“People who want special taxes or subsidies for particular things seem not to understand that what they are really asking for is for prices to misstate the relative scarcities of things and the relative values that the users of these things put on them. . . Making anything artificially cheap usually means that it will be wasted.”
― Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy

“two apparent devils restrict what you can have - the limited amounts of goods and services available, and the rest of us who also want them.”
― Armen A. Alchian, Universal Economics

“The phylogenetically uber-ancient neurological machinery for processing
pleasure and pain has remained largely intact throughout evolution and
across species. It is perfectly adapted for a world of scarcity. Without
pleasure we wouldn’t eat, drink, or reproduce. Without pain we wouldn’t
protect ourselves from injury and death. By raising our neural set point with repeated pleasures, we become endless strivers, never satisfied with what we have, always looking for more.”
― Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

“A friend of mine brought up under socialism would automatically join any queue, noting that if there was a queue, there must be something good at the end of it.”
― Tony Saich, From Rebel to Ruler: One Hundred Years of the Chinese Communist Party

“For billions of years, evolution has been driven by competition caused by the simple fact that, left unchecked, all living things can reproduce faster than their environment can sustain”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“We are, as a species, in the process of proving Malthus’s proposition that population will always outstrip resources.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“All right," she said at last, "I get it. Societies establish their own value system, and once that system is in place, it becomes that society's own cage. It exists to feed itself, in an endless cycle of reconfirming its own arbitrary worth. Still, Adam, some undeniable truths lie at the core of those value systems. Specifically, we exist in a state of scarcity and imbalance, and most if not all of our mechanisms are devoted to managing both.”
― Steven Erikson (Author)