Orson Scott Card Quotes

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights describes the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society. It follows that any choice and decision with regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the family itself, and cannot be made by anyone else.

We must encourage those who earn less than $200 per month and cannot afford to nurture and educate many children never to have more than two... We will regret the time lost if we do not now take the first tentative steps towards correcting a trend which can leave our society with a large number of the physically, intellectually and culturally anemic.

The command "Be fruitful and multiply" was promulgated, according to our authorities, when the population of the world consisted of two people.

Freedom to breed Is intolerable…. People vary. Confronted with appeals to limit breeding, some people will undoubtedly respond to the plea more than others. Those who have more children will produce a larger fraction of the next generation than those with more susceptible consciences. The differences will be accentuated, generation by generation.

Promoting families to have many children clearly does not work…. The main result of the … “many children” benefits has been to skew resources away from family in general and toward a specific group of families instead.

Children when irregularly produced are a cause of great inconvenience.

I myself, in my heart, say that people should have all the children they want. But it's a mistaken idea, like many of our ideas that go back thousands of years, and it must be rooted out.

There's this thing that you're not meant to have too many children - for global warming, it's bad. But I know lots of crappy people, and I would rather that good people have lots of kids and outnumber the baddies.

My views on birth control are somewhat distorted by the fact that I was seventh of nine children.

What will he [Satan] do first? Prevent spirits from coming to earth. How will he do this? He'll do all in his power to promote abortion. He'll convince people to have no children. He will raise fears about over population and encourage governments to make laws that limit the number of children couples can have. He'll do whatever he can to keep those spirits form coming!

I get upset when so many people say there are all sorts of problems in Africa and India where they have these big families. They don't realize that 10 children in rural Tanzania will use less natural resources in a year than one middle class American child. People don't think like that.

It's unconscionable to breed with the number of children who are starving to death in impoverished countries.

I see nothing wrong in sterilizing a man who has already brought eight or ten children into the world. Especially if it helps those eight or ten children to live better.

I had nixed the idea of having children when I was myself a child, having learned in the 1960s that human overpopulation was literally crowding other species off the planet. Why create another mouth to gnaw at the overburdened earth?

The only acceptable way to solve ecological problems is if you can persuade people to have fewer children. In the Victorian times, there were families of 15 children. Someone like Edward Lear, he was the last of 21 children. And so what we have to think about is offering people the alternative choice. And in the West, that's what's happening. The birth rate has been dropping steadily and still is. I'm wanting human beings to be better off so they don't view children as an insurance for the future.

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

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.

How can there be too many children? That is like saying there are too many flowers.

The Church's stand on birth control is the most absolutely spiritual of all her stands and with all of us being materialists at heart, there is little wonder that it causes unease. I wish various fathers would quit trying to defend it by saying that the world can support 40 billion. I will rejoice the day when they say: This is right whether we all rot on top of each other or not, dear children, as we certainly may. Either practice restraint or be prepared for crowding.

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.

Who is going to be the first to face up to the need for self-restraint in the number of children brought into the world?

Any man who, having a child or children he can't support, proceeds to have another should be sterilized at once.

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.

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.

Now that children don't till your fields or take you in when you're incontinent, there is no sensible reason to have them, and it's amazing that with the advent of effective contraception anyone chooses to reproduce at all.