Resource Mismanagement Quotes

It's well-known that people don't respond to scarce resources necessarily in what we might consider a positive light.

Qaddafi is hated because he is the leader of a small country that is rich, but he uses his money to finance liberation struggles.

It pains to see that some investors are importing raw commodities, although just on their door steps, similar produces are left to decay.

Under the all-encompassing aid system, too many places in Africa continue to flounder under inept, corrupt and despotic regimes who spend their time courting and catering to the demands of the army of aid organizations.

I don't want to be an apologist for poverty, but I can't stand waste, useless spending, wasted energy and having to live squandering stuff.

The squandering of the public money sinks into comparative insignificance as a temptation to corruption when compared with the squandering of the public lands.

For instance, people who have to walk miles for water - and we just turn on the faucet and let it run. Or people right here in our country [USA] who are food insecure, and yet we as a nation throw out an inconceivable amount of food.

The country is in the worst conditions ever in its history. It's unjustifiable that in a country with the largest petroleum reserves on the planet, 70% of the food we eat is imported ... that there are 700,000 families in extreme poverty who go to bed hungry every night.

I don't think the approach is to simply give them [the Indian tribes] money, because too much money has disappeared in Indian country, too much has been mismanaged. The history of Indian country is the disappearance of money.

Societies that depend on natural resources tend to have certain inherent problems. The limited concentration of wealth - whether from oil, coal, diamonds, or bauxite - often leads to corruption and authoritarianism.

Most companies don't die because they are wrong; they die because they don't commit themselves. They fritter away their momentum and their valuable resources while attempting to make a decision. The greatest danger is standing still.

Paradoxically, resource-rich developing countries are often worse off than comparable countries that lack those resources. One reason for this is that large resource endowments provide a huge financial incentive for attempts to overthrow the government and seize power.

We must listen to the concerns of our people without dismissing them. When people see something wrong, there is something wrong. When our people see corruption, it means there is corruption. When our people see that their resources are being stolen by certain people, it means this is happening, and we should listen.

All too much of the man-made is ugly, inefficient, depressing chaos.

There are too many unions, monopolists, and bureaucrats that behave like hungry sharks, accustomed to feeding off oil revenues and appropriating the extraordinary wealth that Mexico produces but does not share in an equitable and democratic way.

[Speaking to a group of wealthy New Yorkers] A million years ago, the cave man, without tools, with small brain, and with nothing but the strength of his body, managed to feed his wife and children, so that through him the race survived. You on the other hand, armed with all the modern means of production, multiplying the productive capacity of the cave man a million times — you are incompetents and muddlers, you are unable to secure to millions even the paltry amount of bread that would sustain their physical life. You have mismanaged the world, and it shall be taken from you.

The Communist leaders handle national property as their own, but at the same time they waste it as if it were somebody else's. Such is the nature of ownership and government of the system.

We should be ashamed of ourselves. We inherited the best infrastructure on the globe from our grandparents... and we've taken that inheritance and squandered it.

We know the potentiality of Nigeria and the talent and the resources and to see it having no effect on the lives of the people, on the infrastructure, the roads, the hospitals, the schools, seeing no effect of these talents, these recourses is very frustrating. But it is the result of the damage that was done to the country, especially during the various military regimes.

My work is being destroyed almost as soon as it is printed. One day it is being read; the next day someone's wrapping fish in it.

Secrecy helps give oil wealth its democracy-repelling powers: citizens are satisfied with low taxes and seemingly generous benefits only when they do not realize how much of their country’s wealth is being lost to theft, corruption, and government incompetence.

The misappropriation of resources provided by the government for weapons means the Nigerian military is unable to beat Boko Haram.

Note even Jonathan Swift would dare to write a satire in which politicians argued that - in a world where species are vanishing and more than a billion people are barely able to afford to eat - it would somehow be good for the planet to clear rain-forests to grow palm oil, or give up food-crop land to grow biofuels, solely so that people could burn fuel derived from carbohydrate rather than hydrocarbons in their cars, thus driving up the price of food for the poor. Ludicrous is too weak a word for this heinous crime.

Poor countries are poor because they are wasting their resources.

The Muslim world and its subset the countries of the Middle East have been left behind in the marathon of political, economic and human development. For that, there is a tendency to blame others as the primary cause.