Quotes About Population

We got a plague of people, a disease of people infesting the world. We got more people who are living longer. Less people have to be born, that's the answer. We got death control—we got to match it with birth control.

Birth control doesn't mean no children. It just means that people have a choice how they want to live. Like rutting, unthinking, breeding animals—or like reasoning creatures. Will a married couple have one, two or three children—whatever number will keep the world population steady and provide a full life of opportunity for everyone? Or will they have four, five or six, unthinking and uncaring, and raise them in hunger and cold and misery? Like that world out there

So they think wrong. Am I to blame because the world is full of fatheads? You know well enough that birth control has nothing to do with killing babies. In fact it saves them. Which is the bigger crime—letting kids die of disease and starvation or seeing that the unwanted ones don't get born in the first place?

An army of twenty thousand men, even without camp followers, exceeded the population of most European cities; and when that winding horde of soldiers, with ten to fifteen thousand horses, set out on campaign, it could easily eat up, in a few days, all the food and fodder in the adjacent villages and countryside for many miles around. Such an army could not stay put; it had to move; it had to go on seeking new pastures and more stocks of food.

Los nuevos soldados estarán en general más deseosos de luchar y morir por sus causas. Rara vez llevarán uniformes y puede resultar difícil distinguirlos de la población general. También estarán muy lejos de sentirse coartados por las convenciones y más probablemente procurarán buscar medios innovadores para conseguir sus objetivos.

The British census of Palestine in 1922 recorded 84,000 Jews and 670,000 Arabs, of whom 71,000 were Christian, most of the remainder being Muslim.

Between 1801 and 1901, the population of London soared from one million to over six million.

Mine is a very matter-of-fact approach to the problem. If you can select a population and they're educated and they're properly brought up, then you don't have to use too much of the stick because they would already have been trained. It's like with dogs. You train it in a proper way from small. It will know that it's got to leave, go outside to pee and to defecate. No, we are not that kind of society. We had to train adult dogs who even today deliberately urinate in the lifts.

Demography, not democracy, will be the most critical factor for security and growth in the 21st century

First, we had to get rid of the British.... To do that, you had to mobilize support from the widest possible group and get as big a majority of the population as you could.... First, you've got to get power. Then, having got power, you say, What's the problem? Have I said these things? If so, let's forget it.

No city, no town, no community of more than one thousand people or two hundred buildings to the square mile, shall be built or permitted to exist anywhere in the United States of America.

Indeed, the long-standing establishment embrace of the Malthusian worry explodes any suggestion that anti-growth is a particularly radical position. But then elites have never really liked the vast bulk of humanity, believing us all to be lesser creatures, unlettered, unrefined.

By the time Nixon reached office the environmental cause had grown stronger than ever, thanks in part to media attention given to Malthusian prophets of doom. Paul Ehrlich, a professor of biology at Stanford, published The Population Bomb (1968), which foresaw the starvation of hundreds of millions of people throughout the world during the 1970s and 1980s if population growth were not controlled.

Between 1950 and 1970, the suburban population doubled from 36 million to 74 million as 83% of the nation's population growth took place in the suburbs.

As part of the process of heroification, textbook authors treat America itself as a hero, indeed as the hero of their books, so they remove its warts. Even to report the facts of income and wealth distribution might seem critical of America the hero, for it is difficult to come up with a theory of social justice that can explain why 1 percent of the population controls almost 40 percent of the wealth.

Journalist Philip Gourevitch reports an interview with a Rwandan lawyer who said: "Conformity is very deep, very developed here. In Rwandan history, everyone obeys authority. People revere power, and there isn't enough education. You take a poor, ignorant population, and give them arms, and say, 'It's yours. Kill.' They'll obey.

The extensive surplus of food is what allowed those areas to become densely populated in the first place. It is these two things that allowed for political systems, specialized labor,  writing, property ownership, and more- all things we can't imagine modern society without.

More than 1 billion people do not have access to sufficient water to meet their basic sanitation needs.

There are over seven billion of us today

No neighbourhood or district, no matter how well established, prestigious or well heeled and no matter how intensely populated for one purpose, can flout the necessity for spreading people through time of day without frustrating its potential for generating diversity.

Everyone is aware that tremendous numbers of people concentrate in city downtowns and that, if they did not, there would be no downtown to amount to anything--certainly not one with much downtown diversity.

Overcrowding, which is one symptom of the population instability, continues. It continues, not because the overcrowded people remain, but because they leave. Too many of those who overcome the economic necessity to overcrowd get out, instead of improving their lot within the neighborhood. They are quickly replaced by others who currently have little economic choice. The buildings, naturally, wear out with disproportionate swiftness under these conditions.

Cities grow the middle class. But to keep it as it grows, to keep it as a stabilizing force in the form of a self-diversified population, means considering the city's people valuable and worth retaining, right where they are, before they become middle class.

The only way, I think, to combat vacuums in these cases is to rely on extraordinarily strong counterforces close by. This means that population concentration ought to be made deliberately high (and diverse) near borders, that blocks close to borders should be especially short and potential street use extremely fluid, and that mixtures of primary uses should be abundant; so should mixtures in age of buildings