Gordon Moore Quotes

Rapid population growth and technological innovation, combined with our lack of understanding about how the natural systems of which we are a part work, have created a mess.

Information from destructive activities going back a hundred years right up until today is being incorporated into the system. And as that happens the underlying framework of industrialism is collapsing and causing disintegration.

I feel humiliated that I live in a country that demands more already. Why do we cling to the notion that not only must we maintain the current level of consumption, but that it must continue to grow by an exponential factor of 2 to 7 percent every year?

I do not believe you can have infinite population or economic growth in a finite world. We are living on the shoulders of some awesome geometric curves.

Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill.

We used to live in a world where the price of resources came down steadily, and now the world has changed. You have a great mismatch between finite resources and exponential population growth.

The ecosystem of our world is a closed system: it would run out of gas, collapse of its own weight.

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

We're at peak oil, peak water, peak resources, and so either we figure it out and let science lead or we head down a very bad, dark trail to where a lot of people aren't going to make it.

In the last 200 years the population of our planet has grown exponentially, at a rate of 1.9% per year. If it continued at this rate, with the population doubling every 40 years, by 2600 we would all be standing literally shoulder to shoulder.

One is left with the thought that given the way we now abuse the ocean and abuse the climate that we are heading towards our own iceberg, which is looming on the horizon. It's not visible yet but it certainly exists there and it won't be my generation that has to deal with the fact that the world is not bountiful forever, that the ocean and the atmosphere are not free goods to be abused, that will have to feed these vast populations. That will be your generation.

We're not on a sustainable path in civilization. We're on an exponential growth curve, on which we perhaps always have been, but it has turned up sharply at the beginning of the 20th century.

Shouldn't we also ask ourselves what the consequences are of scrambling to provide the "most" of everything to our children in a world of fast dwindling resources?

Population growth is the primary source of environmental damage.

We're facing growing climate change, more floods, more droughts, more crisis on a planetary level, and the systems we put in place in the twentieth century are just not going to work. We've run out of stuff. Our big problems are going to be energy supplies and food supplies. This is not a right-left issue.

Death is not a disaster. Too many births - that is the real disaster.

Politically it would be terribly repressive to prevent people from having as many children as they want. But something's got to prevent it; and it won't be pleasant... We're still behaving in ways that have become disastrous... I don't think this helps us to survive... We're very species-centric... and now exist at the expense of every other form of life on Earth.

To speak of 'limits to growth' under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society.

Nothing lasts forever, not even the best machines. And everything can be reused. - Hephaestus

Life is exponential. Two becomes four, becomes ten thousand, becomes a plague.

We are no longer inheriting the Earth from our parents, we are stealing it from our children.

He who draws upon his own resources easily comes to an end of his wealth.

For too long we have been taking, and the Earth has been giving. But that free-for-all, that all-you-can-eat buffet, it's over. The salad bar is closed.

There are more fish taken out of a stream than ever were in it.