Quotes from Garrett Hardin

It takes five years for a willing person's mind to change. Have patience with yourself and others when treading in an area protected by a taboo.

Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution.

Of course, a positive growth rate might be taken as evidence that a population is below its optimum.

Fundamentalists are panicked by the apparent disintegration of the family, the disappearance of certainty and the decay of morality. Fear leads them to ask, if we cannot trust the Bible, what can we trust?

Incommensurables cannot be compared.

The optimum population is, then, less than the maximum.

Continuity is at the heart of conservatism: ecology serves that heart.

Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed.

Ecology is the overall science of which economics is a minor speciality.

The social arrangements that produce responsibility are arrangements that create coercion, of some sort.

Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.

However, I think the major opposition to ecology has deeper roots than mere economics; ecology threatens widely held values so fundamental that they must be called religious.

Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

No one should be able to enter a wilderness by mechanical means.

Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all.

Natural selection favors the forces of psychological denial. The individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers. Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed.

Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.

the morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed

But we can never do nothing. That which we have done for thousands of years is also action

The mathematics of biological reproduction is logically identical with the mathematics of usury. Money earns interest, animals have babies. In

It is now widely believed (and, I think, correctly believed) that the survival of a nation under modern competitive conditions depends on broadening the electorate's competency in numerate matters. Numeracy

Individualism is cherished because it produces freedom, but the gift is conditional.

(Technology reliability) x (Human reliability) = (System reliability)

People are the quintessential element in all technology... Once we recognize the inescapable human nexus of all technology our attitude toward the reliability problem is fundamentally changed.