Paul R. Ehrlich Quotes

Anyone who opposes methods to control the birth rate, is automatically voting in favour having the death rate go up.

Zero population growth ….

Africa needs birth control far less than it needs death control.

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.

I don't think that everybody in the planet should have a child. I've never had the desire I should have a kid.

The friends of humanity cannot but wish that in all countries the laboring classes should have a taste for comforts and enjoyments, and that they should be stimulated by all legal means to procure them. There cannot be a better security against a superabundant population.

Those who in principle oppose birth control are either incapable of arithmetic or else in favour of war, pestilence and famine as permanent features of human life.

This seems counterintuitive, but turns out that as infant mortality is reduced, population sizes also decrease, because parents don't need to anticipate that their babies are going to die.

In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 per day.

I do not think any reasonable person can doubt that in India, China and Japan, if the knowledge of birth control existed, the birthrate would fall very rapidly

If it be taught that all who are born have a right to support on the land, whatever be their number, and that there is no occasion to exercise any prudence in the affair of marriage so as to check this number, the temptations, according to all the known principles of human nature, will inevitably be yielded to, and more and more will gradually become dependent on parish assistance.

The country with a low birth rate and low death rate will be hardest hit - and so the poor may indeed inherit the earth, because they're healthier.

Without death in the world, existence in it would soon become, through over-population, the most frightful of curses.

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

Common morality now treats childbearing as an aberration. There are practically no good reasons left for exercising one's fertility.

It is common sense that when women are able to plan their pregnancies, populations grow more slowly and as a result so do greenhouse gas emissions. Providing access to contraception and preventative health should be one of the many effective strategies used to fight climate change.

I do not pretend that birth control is the only way in which population can be kept from increasing. There are others, which, one must suppose, opponents of birth control would prefer.

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.

We have yet to beat our drums for birth control in the way we beat them for polio vaccine. We are still unable to put babies in the class of dangerous epidemics, even though this is the exact truth.

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 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.

If you can't control your reproduction, you can't control your life.

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.