Paul Kagame Quotes

I have nothing against diamonds, or rubies or emeralds or sapphires. I do object when their acquisition is complicit in the debasement of children or the destruction of a country.

Dubai must crack down on rampant smuggling, and the U.A.E. federal government has significantly stepped up pressure.

And I believe that it becomes a troubled continent because there are those who must always cause confusion so that we do not keep these natural resources.

It seems that almost every time a valuable natural resource is discovered in the world-whether it be diamonds, rubber, gold, oil, whatever-often what results is a tragedy for the country in which they are found. Making matters worse, the resulting riches from these resources rarely benefit the people of the country from which they come.

Electronics companies are purchasing the minerals that come out of the Eastern Congo, and they are illicit; they're dirty.

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.

Illicit trade corrupts corporations and governments alike, allows dictators to survive, and obscures oppression, including modern day slavery.

Black markets exist any time there is a profit to be made.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

We've got to search back to our last known safe landmark. I can't say exactly where, but I think it's back there at the start of the Industrial Revolution, we began applying energy in vast amounts to tools with which we began tearing the environment apart.

If the world is presented as resources to be exploited, then, more than likely, you're going to exploit the world.

Many rich people in China made their fortunes by damaging natural resources and building corrupt relations with the government.

For too much of history, we've viewed the world's precious resources - both environmental and human - as things to extract, to make the most of in order to maximize their potential.

For a Canadian, natural resources were a good fit.

In the domain of cops and robbers, an interdiction serves to structure a black market and a shadow economy.

They have stolen the public lands. They have grasped all to themselves, and by their unprincipled greed brought a crisis of unparalleled distress on forty millions of people, who have natural resources to feed, clothe and shelter the whole human race.

Simply that we are mirroring the trends in society, at any given time smuggling was an issue in the seventies, corruption is an issue today, and we faithfully reflect those issues.

To get into Afghanistan, I bribed my way into a camel caravan of smugglers.

Important reserves of natural resources, like petroleum and precious metals, are the bulwarks for laying the foundations for the future.

As a result of manifest destiny, we gutted our resources.

For far too long the world's poorest people have seen no benefit from the vast natural resources in their own backyards. It is time to end the injustice where ordinary people are silent witnesses, left to suffer without basic services, as the profits from their countries' assets are hidden and plundered by corrupt regimes.

But when you have bad governance, of course, these resources are destroyed: The forests are deforested, there is illegal logging, there is soil erosion. I got pulled deeper and deeper and saw how these issues become linked to governance, to corruption, to dictatorship.

There is hardly a place on Earth where people do not log, pave, spray, drain, flood, graze, fish, plow, burn, drill, spill or dump. There is no life zone, with the possible exception of the deep ocean, that we are not degrading.

Three centuries ago they came for sandalwood. Today the bastards are after our genes

At an ever accelerating rate we are now squandering the capital of metallic ores and fossil fuels accumulated in the earth’s crust during hundreds of millions of years. How long can this spending spree go on?