Daniel Hamburg Quotes

The danger facing us comes not from lack of resources, but from people who insist that we have run out of resources. If you embrace their idea of a world where there is only so much to go around, then you are endorsing a program of genocide and a war of all against all.

As we move towards 8 or 10 billion people on the planet, there's a little less gold per capita. Each one of us will continue to be fighting over an ever smaller percentage of total resources. This is not a happy thought.

When you think of all the conflicts we have - whether those conflicts are local, whether they are regional or global - these conflicts are often over the management, the distribution of resources. If these resources are very valuable, if these resources are scarce, if these resources are degraded, there is going to be competition.

War is usually fought over diminishing resources, particulary those that we perceive to be extremely valuable.

When you're fighting for an increasingly smaller portion of the pie, you turn against each other; you create reasons to hate each other.

When resources become skimpy, human beings don't suddenly cooperate to conserve what's left. They fight to the last scrap for possession of a diminishing resource.

The stakes in conflict do not change. Battle determines who will control the wealth or its equivalent.

The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.

Priorities are set by legislators, regulators and industry interests. The consumer gets the left-overs.

We're frightened by the interest groups. We act like silly nincompoops. We can't make cuts that cause some sting. We can not even do a thing.

Not all special interest groups are bad.

In a competitive world of limited resources, total freedom of individual action is intolerable

Poverty - the greatest cause of human suffering on the planet - is itself exacerbated by conflict, competition for resources, injustice, even the global downturn and climate change. Diseases like AIDS, TB and malaria cannot be tackled without adequate resources. So you see everything is connected. In order to address any major cause of human suffering, we have to work together across many fronts.

As government grows bigger and more directly involved in the economy, the question of who gets what, through the medium of the lobbyist as broker, is of paramount importance.

We want political power in our country for our philosophy of life. This means we've got to get involved more and more in politics.

The causes of war are the same as the causes of competition among individuals: acquisitiveness, pugnacity, and pride; the desire for food, land, materials, fuels, mastery. The state has our instincts without our restraints.

[Politics is a] war of all against all … a quest for power after power that ceaseth only in death.

One interest must be opposed to another interest. Vices, as they exist, must be turned against each other.

The munitions manufacturers and the war lords are in the saddle.

Everyone who lobbies represents someone’s particular point of view.

The most frequent reason why men desire to hurt each other, ariseth hence, that many men at the same time have an Appetite to the same thing; which yet very often they can neither enjoy in common, nor yet divide it.

It’s the people verses the special interests and I’m going to fight this out till the end.

In a free government, the few, finding their schemes and views of interest borne down by the many, to gain the power they cannot constitutionally obtain, always endeavor to get it by cunning and corruption, conscious at the same time that usurpation, when once begun, the safety of the usurper consists only in grasping the whole.

Human use of one resource runs squarely against human use of another resource.

We have witnessed for more than a quarter of a century the struggles of the two great political parties for power and plunder, while grievous wrongs have been inflicted upon the suffering people. We charge that the controlling influences dominating both these parties have permitted the existing dreadful conditions to develop without serious effort to prevent or restrain them.