Will Durant Quotes
In the last analysis civilization is based upon the food supply.
Durant, Will. The Story of Civilization, Vol. 1: Our Oriental Heritage. Simon and Schuster, 1935, p. 3.
Johnson insisted that he would not provide food to ease India’s famine until the nation adopted a family planning program including education about all methods of birth control and making available devices such as condoms to India’s poor
While this was somewhat hyperbolic at the time, it became true during the century.
From a technical and production point of view, there is no practical limit to population size that is imposed by food production. We can produce sufficient food for the world even if population increases dramatically. None the less, even today we have some starvation and much malnutrition problems. These however are political, economic and tend to be distributional. We can produce the food. Morris does NOT advocate large population growth. Although food need not be a problem with an expanding population, job availability, medical care, energy, land, natural resources, ethnic hatred, migration, violence, and other problems are produced by population growth.
William James Durant was a Russian born, historian, and philosopher. He became best known for his work “The Story of Civilization,” and acclaimed 11 volume series written over 50 years in collaboration with his wife, Ariel Durant, and published between 1935 and 1975. He was earlier noted for The Story of Philosophy (1926), described as "a groundbreaking work that helped to popularize philosophy". They were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1968 and in 1977, the Durants were presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
