Frank Herbert Quotes

Democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, but it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies.

As we move towards 8 or 10 billion people on the planet, there's a little less gold per capita. Each one of us will continue to be fighting over an ever smaller percentage of total resources. This is not a happy thought.

A billion could live off the earth; 6 billion living as we do is far too many, and you run out of planet in no time.

There are probably already too many people on the planet.

But as population became denser, the natural chemical and biological recycling processes became overloaded, calling for a redefinition of property rights.

We have to stabilize the population of this planet.

The best "gift" anyone can give to humankind is to remain birth-free. It is a SIN for any person to birth while earth births exceed deaths. For what purpose would the world need more than 50,000 new Homo sapiens every year?

It's going to destroy it all. I use what I call my bathroom metaphor. If two people live in an apartment, and there are two bathrooms, then both have what I call freedom of the bathroom, go to the bathroom any time you want, and stay as long as you want to for whatever you need. And this to my way is ideal. And everyone believes in the freedom of the bathroom. It should be right there in the Constitution. But if you have 20 people in the apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much every person believes in freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up times for each person, you have to bang at the door … and so on. And in the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, but it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies.

One always returns to the fact that there are just too many of us, the population continues to rise and it's unsustainable.

I think as resources become more dear, we really need to consider population.

We are not overpopulated in an absolute sense; we've got the technology for 10 billion, probably 15 billion people, to live on this planet and live good lives. What we haven't done is developed our technology.

A finite world can support only a finite population; therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero.

Man tends to increase at a greater rate than his means of subsistence.

We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can't support many more people.

If we do not voluntarily bring population growth under control in the next one or two decades, the nature will do it for us in the most brutal way, whether we like it or not.

The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.

When is population going to become an accepted part of the food debate? If it's fine to encourage people to think about halving their meat consumption, can we really not cope with a conversation about how many children we have?

Man will survive as a species for one reason: He can adapt to the destructive effects of our power-intoxicated technology and of our ungoverned population growth, to the dirt, pollution and noise of a New York or Tokyo. And that is the tragedy. It is not man the ecological crisis threatens to destroy but the quality of human life.

Overpopulation is perhaps the biggest problem facing us, and immigration is part of that problem. It has to be addressed.

Thicken Population.

One of the most serious challenges to human destiny in the last third of this century will be the growth of population …. When future generations evaluate the record of. our time, one of the most important factors in their judgment will be the way in which we respond to population growth

You only have to ask yourself, "What would happen if the entire population of India and China had two-car garages and were living at the technological and the economic standard that the American middle class is today?" The planet would become very rapidly uninhabitable.

The key to understanding overpopulation is not population density but the numbers of people in an area relative to its resources and the capacity of the environment to sustain human activities; that is, to the area’s carrying capacity. When is an area overpopulated? When its population can’t be maintained without rapidly depleting nonrenewable resources.... By this standard, the entire planet and virtually every nation is already vastly overpopulated

… human population growth within the ecosystem was closely analogous to the growth of malignant tumor cells within an organism: that man was acting like a cancer on the biosphere. The multiplication of human numbers certainly seems wild and uncontrolled... Four million a month - the equivalent of the population of Chicago... We seem to be doing all right at the moment; but if you could ask cancer cells, I suspect they would think they were doing fine. But when the organism dies, so do they; and for our own, selfish, practical, utilitarian reasons, I think we should be careful about how we influence the rest of the ecosystem.

The imperatives of the population explosion, … almost inevitably will lessen our belief in the sanctity of the individual human life