Quotes
Aristotle - “(A large increase in population would bring) certain poverty on the citizenry, and poverty is the cause of sedition and evil.”
Sir David Attenborough - “I’ve never seen a problem that wouldn’t be easier to solve with fewer people or, harder, and ultimately impossible, with more.” “The human population can no longer be allowed to grow in the same old uncontrolled way. If we do not take charge of our population size, then nature will do it for us and it is the poor people of the world who will suffer most.”
Kofi Annan (UN) - “The idea that population growth guarantees a better life - financially or otherwise - is a myth that only those who sell nappies, prams and the like have any right to believe.”
Professor Albert Bartlett - “Can you think of any problem on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted or advanced by having larger populations at the local level, the state level, the national level, or globally?”
Confucius - “”…excessive (population) growth may reduce output per worker, repress levels of living for the masses and engender strife.”
Jacques-Yves Cousteau - “Overconsumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face today.”
Cameron Diaz - “I think women are afraid to say that they don’t want children because they’re going to get shunned. But I think that’s changing too now. I have more girlfriends who don’t have kids than those that do. And, honestly? We don’t need any more kids. We have plenty of people on this planet.”
Paul Ehrlich - “Overdrafts on aquifers are one reason some of our geologist colleagues are convinced that water shortages will bring the human population explosion to a halt. There are substitutes for oil; there is no substitute for fresh water.” “Whatever problem you’re interested in, you’re not going to solve it unless you also solve the population problem.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson - “If government knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply the population.”
Albert Einstein - “Overpopulation in various countries has become a serious threat to the health of people and a grave obstacle to any attempt to organize peace on this planet.”
James P. Grant (UNICEF) - “Family planning could bring more benefits to more people at less cost than any other single technology now available to the human race”
Lyndon B Johnson (US President) - “The hungry world cannot be fed until and unless growth of its resources and the growth of its population come into balance. Each man and woman and each nation - must make decisions of conscience and policy in the face of this great problem.”
Professor John Guillebaud and Doctor Pippa Hayes - “Should we now explain to UK couples who plan a family that stopping at two children, or at least having one less than first intended, is the simplest and biggest contribution anyone can make to leraving a habitable planet for our grandchildren?”
Martin Luther King - “Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess. What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and education of the billions who are its victims.”
James Lovelock - “Those who fail to see that population growth and climate change are two sides of the same coin are either ignorant or hiding from the truth. These two huge environmental problems are inseparable and to discuss one while ignoring the other is irrational.”
Joanna Lumley - “I don’t think there’s any denying the fact that there are too many people in the world. I know that’s an awful thing to say, and people say you’re Hitler if you say it, but the human population is growing now so fast, and they need so much more to keep themselves alive – and indeed in developing nations, to reach a standard they would like to reach, i.e. with more cars, more TV sets. Which is completely understandable. But if a hundred people want a new car, that’s one thing – but if a million people want a new car… So I think the green issues – which is the cutting down of forests to make more room to graze more cows to make into more beefburgers – that comes from the quantity of people. And we’ve never addressed that.
Nicololas Machiavelli - “When every province of the world so teems with inhabitants that they can neither subsist where they are nor remove themselves elsewhere… the world will purge itself in one or another of these three ways (floods, plague and famine)”
Robert McNamara - “Short of nuclear war itself, population growth is the gravest issue the world faces. If we do not act, the problem will be solved by famine, riots, insurrection and war.”
Thomas Malthus - “”Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.”
Thoraya Ahmed Obaid (UNPF) - “We cannot confront the massive challenges of poverty, hunger, disease and environmental destruction unless we address issues of population and reproductive health.”
Jonathon Porritt - “Population raises all these questions about religion, about culture, about male dominance in the world; and (people) get very uncomfortable about that.”
Tertullian - “”The strongest witness is the vast population of the earth to which we are a burden and she scarcely can provide for our needs”
