Overpopulation Quotes

“I know what cancer was. How is it like humankind?"

Sek Hardeen's perfectly modulated, softly accented tones showed a hint of agitation. "We have spread out through the galaxy like cancer cells through a living body, Duré. We multiply without thought to the countless life forms that must die or be pushed aside so that we may breed and flourish. We eradicate competing forms of intelligent life.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“A crowded society is a restrictive society; an overcrowded society becomes an authoritarian, repressive and murderous society.”
― Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“We are the hands and eyes and ears, the sensitive probing feelers through which the emergent, intelligent universe comes to know its own form and purpose. We bring the thunderbolt of meaning and significance to unconscious matter, blank paper, the night sky. We are already divine magicians, already supergods. Why shouldn't we use all our brilliance to leap in as many single bounds as it takes to a world beyond ours, threatened by overpopulation, mass species extinction, environmental degradation, hunger, and exploitation? Superman and his pals would figure a way out of any stupid cul-de-sac we could find ourselves in - and we made Superman, after all. All it takes is that one magic word.”
― Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

“Our object must be to bring our territory into harmony with the numbers of our population.”
― Adolf Hitler

“Europe is overpopulated, the world will soon be in the same condition, and if the self-reproduction of man is not rationalized... we shall have war.”
― Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion

“Ozone depletion, lack of water, and pollution are not the disease—they are the symptoms. The disease is overpopulation. And unless we face world population head-on, we are doing nothing more than sticking a Band-Aid on a fast-growing cancerous tumor.”
― Dan Brown, Inferno

“Cancer is nothing more than a healthy cell that starts replicating out of control.”
― Dan Brown, Inferno

“Man begets, but land does not beget. ”
― Cecil Rhodes

“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.”
― Alan Weisman, Countdown: Our Last Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

“When we can treat all existing persons as human, it will be time enough to think about having more.”
― Athelstan Spilhaus

“Overpopulation is by far the worst kind of pollution.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“In the days when money was backed by its face value in silver or gold, there were limits to how much wealth could flow around the world. Today, it's virtual money that the bank lends into existence on a computer screen. "And unless the economy continually expands, there is no new flow of money to pay back that money, plus interest." . . . "As it stands now, if banks start loaning money more slowly than they collect debts, the quantity of money in the economy goes down, and it's impossible to pay back debts. So we get defaults on houses . . . our economy plunges into misery and unemployment. Under our current monetary system, the only alternative to that is endless growth. So one absolute thing we have to change is the whole nature of the monetary system. . . . we deny banks the right to create money." . . . There's a challenge with that solution, he admits. "You're trying to take the right to create wealth away from some of the wealthiest people on the planet.”
― Alan Weisman, Countdown: Our Last Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

“Refusing to have a child is the highest degree of rebellion, after suicide; one of the best uses of the mind; and the best gift to the planet.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The great majority of “consumption” (throughput) does not involve individual product users at all. For example, the average rate at which people produce waste, mentioned above by [Jared] Diamond, is calculated by dividing the total population into the total waste. But since 99 percent of all solid waste in the United States today comes from industrial processes, eliminating all household waste would have little effect on per capita waste. Diamond’s “average rate” is meaningless.”
― Ian Angus, Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis

“But the real danger is that liberal environmentalists and feminists will strengthen the right by lending credibility to reactionary arguments. Adopting the argument that population growth causes global warming endorses the strongest argument the right has against the social and economic changes that are really needed to stop climate change and environmental destruction.”
― Ian Angus, Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis

“The assumption that economic expansion is driven by consumer demand—more consumers equals more growth—is a fundamental part of the economic theories that underlie the model. In other words, their conclusions are predetermined by their assumptions.

What the model actually tries to do is to use neoclassical economic theory to predict how much economic growth will result from various levels of population growth, and then to estimate the emissions growth that would result. Unfortunately, as Yves Smith says about financial economics, any computer model based on mainstream economic theory “rests on a seemingly rigorous foundation and elaborate math, much like astrology.”

In short, if your computer model assumes that population growth causes emissions growth, then it will tell you that fewer people will produce fewer emissions. Malthus in, Malthus out.”
― Ian Angus, Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis

“The ultimate measure of human success is not production but reproduction. Economic productivity and profit are means to reproductive ends, not ends in themselves.”
― Pierre L. van den Berghe, The Ethnic Phenomenon

“Every example throughout the history of humanity shows that only deprivation and struggle create a human life worthy of the name”
― Pentti Linkola, Can Life Prevail?

“For a protector of life, who is moved by the diversity of life (biodiversity), it is unthinkable that the whole Earth should belong only to one animal species, humanity. Look at man, this person will say: look at him in Bosnia, Palestine, Rwanda, Kurdistan; or look at him in Finland, engaging in inheritance disputes or phone sex or the trade union movement: is man above all other forms of life? Does man have the right to rule the destiny of millions of basically similar species? Is man the living image of God?”
― Pentti Linkola, Can Life Prevail?

“I did not choose to live in Tangier permanently; it happened. My visit was meant to be of short duration; after that I would move on, and keep moving onward indefinitely. I grew lazy and put off departure. Then a day came when I realized with a shock that not only did the world have many more people in it than it had had only a short time before, but also that the hotels were less good, travel less comfortable, and places in general much less beautiful. After that when I went somewhere else I immediately longed to be back in Tangier. Thus if I am here now, it is only because I was still here when I realized to what an extent the world had worsened, and that I no longer wanted to travel.”
― Paul Bowles, Without Stopping

“Quoted on page 50 of: JACK PARSONS ON HUMAN POPULATION COMPETITION A short synopsis of his major work by Edmund Davey
ISBN: 0-9541978-3-6

"No quantity of atom bombs could stem the tide of billions … who will someday … erupt [from] the poor southern part of the world … into the relatively accessible spaces of the rich Northern Hemisphere looking for survival."

President Boumedienne of Algeria.”
― Houari Boumediene

“Page 550:
CG Darwin—grandson of the great Charles—argued in The Next Million Years (1978), an important book, that if humankind as a whole comprised two subtypes, Homo contracipiens (contraceptive practitioners) and Homo progenitivus (non- or lower-practitioners), then the second type would inevitable come to dominate, and finally exclude, the first. Once H. progenitivus had ousted H. contracipiens, the group would increase with even greater intensity until it hit some barrier; an effective population control policy; lack of food or some other basic resource.”
― Jack Parsons, Human Population Competition: A Study of the Pursuit of Power Through Numbers

“There is no explosion in human population, there's only explosion in selfishness, recklessness and indifference. If we could just overpower these primitive tenets, earth could sustain not seven billion, but seventy billion lives quite majestically. A society that has no grip over its selfishness, has to focus on population control.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Gentalist: There's No Social Work, Only Family Work

“Page 429:

The identifying characteristics of Marxist biology are numerous. Salient among these is the rejection of Malthusian doctrine. As Margaret Sanger admitted, "A remarkable feature of Marxian propaganda has been the almost complete unanimity with which the implications of the Malthusian doctrines have been derided, denounced, and repudiated. Any defense of the so-called 'Law of Population' was enough to stamp one, in the eyes of the orthodox Marxians, as a 'tool of the capitalistic class,' seeking to dampen the ardor of those who expressed the belief that men might create a better world for themselves. Malthus, they claimed, was actuated by selfish motives. He was not merely a hidebound aristocrat, but a pessimist who was trying to kill all hope of human progress. By Marx, Engels, Bebel, Kautsky and the celebrated leaders and interpreters of Marx's great 'Bible of the Working Class' ... birth control has been looked upon as a subtle Machiavelian sophistry created for the purpose of placing the blame for human misery elsewhere than at the door of the capitalistic class. Upon this point the orthodox Marxian mind has been universally and sternly uncompromising.”
― Conway Zirkle, Evolution, Marxian biology and the social scene

“I don't think we can name a single poor nation where population control programs have worked. I don't think we can name a single affluent country that has not reduced population growth, often below ZPG.”
― Wallace Kaufman

“If you’re worried about overpopulation and you are not worried about overconsumption, you just don’t like poor people—and in this case poor brown people. So really what it boils down to.”
― Beau of the Fifth Column

“Increase of population was always good news to us. More people, more sales.”
― Frederik Pohl, The Space Merchants

“we should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavouring to impede, the operations of nature, in producing this mortality”
― Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay On the Principle of Population, As It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, Volumen i

“The big social utopias—Communism, Fascism—have led to incredible disasters. Overpopulation of our planet. You just name it. Destruction of what nature is. All of that started in the 20th century... I do believe that the 20th century, in its entirety, was a mistake.”
― Werner Herzog

“The greatest threat to Mankind, and all of life on this beautiful Planet, is not Climate Change, Over Population, Terrorism, Racism, Resource Scarcity or some Deadly Disease. No, the greatest threat to Mankind is the same today as it was over a thousand years ago; We are ruled by Parasitical Psychopaths who plunge us into war, manipulate us against each other, and flood our minds with fear, hate, bigotry and ignorance with every chance they get.”
― Gavin Nascimento