Quotes About Population

Whether we accept it or not, this will likely be the century that determines what the optimal human population is for our planet. It will come about in one of two ways: Either we decide to manage our own numbers, to avoid a collision of every line on civilization's graph - or nature will do it for us, in the form of famines, thirst, climate chaos, crashing ecosystems, opportunistic disease, and wars over dwindling resources that finally cut us down to size.

Laws alone can not secure freedom of expression; in order that every man present his views without penalty there must be spirit of tolerance in the entire population.

The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg- eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.

A whole population of strangers inhabited and shaped that little body, lived in that mind and controlled its wishes, dictated its thoughts...The name was an abstraction, a title arbitrarily given, like France or England, to a collection, never long the same, of many individuals who were born, lived, and died within him, as the inhabitants of a country appear and disappear, but keep alive in their passage the identity of the nation to which they belong.

Medical Science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.

An impersonal generation will take the place of Nature's hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world.

The problem of rapidly increasing numbers in relation to natural resources, to social stability and to the well-being of individuals—this is now the central problem of mankind; and it will remain the central problem certainly for another century, and perhaps for several centuries thereafter.

in our random and unregulated way we are not only over-populating our planet, we are also, it would seem, mak­ing sure that these greater numbers shall be of biologically poorer quality. In the bad old days children with considerable, or even with slight, hereditary defects rarely survived. Today, thanks to sanitation, modern pharmacology and the social conscience, most of the children born with hereditary defects reach maturity and multiply their kind.

Tenemos dos alternativas: por un lado, el hambre, la peste y la guerra; por otro, la regulación de los nacimientos.

The machine turns, turns and must keep on turning—for ever. It is death if it stands still. A thousand millions scrabbled the crust of the earth. The wheels began to turn. In a hundred and fifty years there were two thousand millions. Stop all the wheels. In a hundred and fifty weeks there are once more only a thousand millions; a thousand thousand thousand men and women have starved to death.

We are given two choices—famine, pestilence and war on the one hand, birth control on the other.

By making harmless chemical euphoria freely available, a dictator could reconcile an entire population to a state of affairs to which self-respecting human beings ought not to be reconciled.

If we could bokanovskify indefinitely the whole problem would be solved

No se corre mucho riesgo apostando a que, dentro de veinte años, todos los países excesivamente poblados y poco desarrollados del mundo estarán bajo una u otra forma de gobierno totalitario, probablemente del Partido Comunista. ¿Cómo

The optimum population,' said Mustapha Mond, 'is modelled on the iceberg-eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.

Further, an excess of legislation defeats its own ends. It makes the whole population criminals, and turns them all into police and police spies. The moral health of such a people is ruined for ever; only revolution can save it.

The model is constructed in such a way that the global population will eventually level off and start declining, if industrial output per capita rises high enough. But we see little "real world" evidence that the richest people or nations ever lose interest in getting richer. Therefore, policies built into World3 represent the assumption that capital owners will continue to seek gains in their wealth indefinitely and that consumers will always want to increase their consumption.

The global distribution of wealth and opportunities is extremely skewed. The richest 20 percent of the world's population controls more than 80 percent of the world gross product and uses nearly 60 percent of world commercial energy. (Source: World Bank.)

If current predictions of population growth prove accurate and patterns of human activity on the planet remain unchanged, science and technology may not be able to prevent either irreversible degradation of the environment or continued poverty for much of the world. —ROYAL SOCIETY OF LONDON AND U.S. NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, 1992

The more output that is produced, the more can be invested to make new capital. This is a reinforcing loop, like the birth loop for a population. The investment fraction is equivalent to the fertility. The greater the fraction of its output a society invests, the faster its capital stock will grow.

The central question of economic development is how to keep the reinforcing loop of capital accumulation from growing more slowly than the reinforcing loop of population growth—so that people are getting richer instead of poorer.

If an eventual nine billion people all consumed materials at the rate of the average late-twentieth-century American, that would require an increase in worldwide steel production by a factor of five, copper by a factor of eight, and aluminum by a factor of nine.

The more users there are, the more resource is used. The more resource is used, the less there is per user.

fertility and intelligence, dysgenics, and the Idiocracy effect.