“Nothing can be settled in isolation. Every use of our resources is at the expense of an alternative use.”

— John Maynard Keynes

Source: How to Pay for the War (1940), Ch. 1 : The Character of the Problem

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Nothing can be settled in isolation. Every use of our resources is at the expense of an alternative use." by John Maynard Keynes?

John Maynard Keynes 122

British economist 1883–1946

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) poet and political activist

Introduction
The Life of Poetry (1949)
Context: In time of crisis, we summon up our strength.
Then, if we are lucky, we are able to call every resource, every forgotten image that can leap to our quickening, every memory that can make us know our power. And this luck is more than it seems to be: it depends on the long preparation of the self to be used.
In time of the crises of the spirit, we are aware of all our need, our need for each other and our need for our selves. We call up, with all the strength of summoning we have, our fullness.

“Everywhere water is under threat. It is our most precious resource. And there is no alternative to it.”

Lewis Pugh (1969) Environmental campaigner, maritime lawyer and endurance swimmer

Address to Cape Town Press Club, 13 May 2011 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpVFBOVJKX4
Speaking & Features

“Danger alone acquaints us with our own resources, our virtues, our armor and weapons, our spirit — and forces us to be strong …”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Twilight of the Idols

Twilight of the Idols (1888)
Context: How is freedom measured, in individuals as in nations? By the resistance which must be overcome, by the effort [Mühe] it costs to remain on top. The highest type of free men should be sought where the highest resistance is constantly overcome: five steps from tyranny, close to the threshold of the danger of servitude. This is true psychologically if by "tyrants" are meant inexorable and dreadful instincts that provoke the maximum of authority and discipline against themselves — most beautiful type: Julius Caesar —; this is true politically too; one need only go through history. The nations which were worth something, became worth something, never became so under liberal institutions: it was great danger that made something of them that merits respect. Danger alone acquaints us with our own resources, our virtues, our armor and weapons, our spirit — and forces us to be strong...

“We are no longer afraid to voice our opinions, to use our power, to pool our resources, to allow our differences to unite us instead of keeping us apart.”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Books, I Have Chosen To Stay And Fight, ACTIVISM

“Settle it therefore in your minds, as a maxim never to be effaced or forgotten, that atheism is an inhuman, bloody, ferocious system, equally hostile to every useful restraint and to every virtuous affection; that, leaving nothing above us to excite awe, nor round us to awaken tenderness, it wages war with heaven and with earth: its first object is to dethrone God, its next to destroy man.”

Robert Hall (1764–1831) British Baptist pastor

Rev. Robert Hall, sermon to Baptist meeting, Cambridge, quoted in [1843, The Baptist Library: a republication of standard Baptist works, 2, Charles George Sommers, William R. Williams, Levi L. Hill, 108, http://books.google.com/books?id=CgxMAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA108]

“I believe we have a responsibility not only to our contemporaries but also to future generations — a responsibility to preserve resources that belong to them as well as to us, and without which none of us can survive.”

Kofi Annan (1938–2018) 7th Secretary-General of the United Nations

Truman Library address (2006)
Context: I believe we have a responsibility not only to our contemporaries but also to future generations — a responsibility to preserve resources that belong to them as well as to us, and without which none of us can survive. That means we must do much more, and urgently, to prevent or slow down climate change. Everyday that we do nothing, or too little, imposes higher costs on our children and our children’s children. Of course, it reminds me of an African proverb — the earth is not ours but something we hold in trust for future generations. I hope my generation will be worthy of that trust.

“We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now we can control our future instead of letting the future control us.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

““Our sense of alternative is the sense that the transcending view which connects us with our Divine Ideal, and which moves us evermore toward harmony with that, is really ever-living, and so affords resources to reduce our defective difference and carry us beyond all temporal actualities. So that when we halt in any stage of these, and act as if our aim and object ended there, and we were there fulfilled, we know that this is false. We know that we have belied our real being, that in our true nature is a fountain out-measuring every possible actuality, that therefore we might have done differently, and that consequently we have contracted guilt”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

guilt, not simply before some external tribunal, be it even God's, but guilt before the more inexorable bar of our own soul.”
Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.370-1

“I know that grief, like regret, settles into our DNA and remains forever a part of us.”

Kristin Hannah book The Nightingale

Source: The Nightingale

“A study in scarlet, eh? Why shouldn't we use a little art jargon? There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.”

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) Scottish physician and author

Source: Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I

“Nothing can be settled in isolation. Every use of our resources is at the expense of an alternative use.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

John Maynard Keynes 122

Related quotes

Related topics