John Holdren Quotes

The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.

We're too many people; that's why we have global warming...on a voluntary basis, everybody in the world's got to pledge to themselves that one child is it.

China's one-child policy punishes families for having 'out-of-plan' children, resulting in sex-selective abortion and tens of millions of 'missing girls' as well as forced abortion and sterilization campaigns.

We have access to practical, ethical and scientifically established methods of birth control. So I think that is the most ethical way to reduce our population.

Our primary objective is to reduce British over-population. But many leaders of foreign nations approach us to help them get a handle on their burgeoning population.

Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon American society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupid, cruel sentimentalism.

At the moment there are 1 in 8 people who have no access to clear drinking water, about a billion people worldwide, which can make you feel quite overwhelmed.

The Himalayan Glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau have been among the most affected by global warming. The Himalayas...provide more than half of the drinking water for 40% of the world's population...Within the next half-century, that 40% of the world's people may well face a very serious drinking water shortage, unless the world acts boldly and quickly to mitigate global warming.

By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth's population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people.

There is a single theme behind all our work-we must reduce population levels.

It's terrible to have to say this. World population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. This is so horrible to contemplate that we shouldn't even say it. But the general situation in which we are involved is lamentable.

Something is very, very wrong when people don’t have access to drinking water, and Coke creates its market out of that scarcity.

The redundant population, necessarily occasioned by the prevalence of early marriages, must be repressed by occasional famines, and by the custom of exposing children, which, in times of distress, is probably more frequent than is ever acknowledged to Europeans.

Right now, huge numbers of people cannot obtain even drinking water, and the situation is likely to become worse with predicted climate change and failure to take the actions that are necessary.

On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.

It is a simple logic truth that, short of mass emigration into space, with rockets taking off at the rate of several million per second, uncontrolled birth-rates are bound to lead to horribly increased death –rates. It is hard to believe that this simple truth is not understood by those leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods. They express a preference for ‘natural’ methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.

If some individuals contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children, and if the need is compelling, they can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility — just as they can be required to exercise responsibility in their resource-consumption patterns — providing they are not denied equal protection

There would be no population explosion if people who are trying to keep the wolf from the door wouldn't let the stork fly in through the window.

Not everybody has to be a parent. In fact, in an overpopulated world where our resources are shrinking, it would be wonderful if people who didn't want children felt free to say so. In the 1970s, there was more tolerance for the idea that not everybody needs to be a biological parent.

A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men.

I watched the piles of feces go up the conveyor belt... They made their way through the machine... A few minutes later I took a long taste of the end result: a glass of delicious drinking water.

The world today has 6.8 billion people...that's headed up to about 9 billion. If we do a really great job on vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 to 15 percent.

The reason Social Security is in big trouble is we don't have enough workers to support the retirees. Well, a third of all the young people in America are not in America today because of abortion, because one in three pregnancies end in abortion.