Jog my memory please:

There is a saying in the Arab world, alluding to the mixed benefit of oil.

It's something like "Tears of the devil". Anyone know it?
 
I read this somewhere,....


The arab oilman said,......

"My grandfather rode a camel, my father drove a toyota, I drive a mercedes, my son flys a learjet and my grandson will ride a camel".


See ya's.
 
i asked around...supposedly said when it rains while the sun is shining; with the rain representing the tears of the devil's wife.

ring a bell?
 
I know TC's saying but the one I want refers to oil being as much a curse as a blessing.

The reason I was thinking about it is that we in Australia are at risk of developing "Dutch disease" as bulk commodity wealth kills "general" commerce. The Arab saying has a little more poetry than simply saying "Dutch disease".
 
This was all I could find; Hope you find the exact quote :(

The Devil’s tears

In Azerbaijan, oil is known as the Devil’s tears - a curse for the desperately poor Azeris and a blessing for their autocratic rulers. Satan cried a lot in this former Soviet satellite state on the west coast of the Caspian Sea. His tears were mostly shed offshore.

Oil has fantastic powers: Like the genie from One Thousand and One Nights, it can grant impossible political wishes both fair and foul. This is why the U.S. oil baron John D. Rockefeller once, in a moment of reflection, called oil “the Devil’s tears,” and why Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, in a moment of exasperation, wished that Saudi Arabia had discovered water, and why the late Venezuelan writer Jose Ignacio Cabrujas, in a moment of subversion, wrote that oil can create “a culture of miracles” that erases memory.

Canadians, the newly minted inhabitants of “an emerging energy superpower,” now stand at the gas pumps cursing the price of oil and the prospect of shortened summer vacations. Yet they forget that many of our ancestors agonized about the price of slaves only 200 years ago. We too complained bitterly about the cost of feeding indentured labour, and dismissed the ugly rhetoric of abolitionists as offensive
 
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