Sustainable Population Quotes

A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.

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.

The importation of foreigners into a country that has as many inhabitants as the present employments and provisions for subsistence will bear, will be in the end no increase of people, unless the new comers have more industry and frugality than the natives, and then they will provide more subsistence, and increase in the country; but they will gradually eat the natives out. Nor is it necessary to bring in foreigners to fill up any occasional vacancy in a country for such vacancy will soon be filled by natural generation.

Either we reduce the world's population voluntarily or nature will do this for us, but brutally

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?

Once it was necessary that the people should multiply and be fruitful if the race was to survive. But now to preserve the race it is necessary that people hold back the power of propagation.

The bigger the population gets, the more serious the problems become... We have to address the population issue. The United Nations, with the U.S. supporting it, took the position in Cairo in 1994 that every country was responsible for stabilizing its own population. It can be done. But in this country, it's phony to say 'I'm for the environment but not for limiting immigration.'

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.

He looked beyond. He looked to the peoples of the Earth and saw the destruction of the family because of the lack of children. Paul VI was courageous. He was a good pastor. He warned his sheep about the wolves that were approaching, and from the heavens he blesses us today.

If people waited to know one another before they married, the world wouldn't be as overpopulated as it is now.

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.

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.

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?

it will be objected that a constantly increasing population makes resistance and conservation a hopeless battle. this is true. unless a way is found to stabilize the nation's population, the parks can not be saved. or anything else worth a damn. wilderness preservation, like a hundred other good causes, will be forgotten under the overwhelming pressure of a struggle for mere survival and sanity in a completely urbanized, completely industrialized, ever more crowded environment. for my own part i would rather take my chances in a thermonuclear war than live in such a world.

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

Democracy cannot survive overpopulation.

It's alright all of us all living saying 'oh well there's enough of us so we won't have anymore, don't let anybody else live.' I don't believe in that.

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

For the planet's sake, I hope we have bird flu or some other thing that will reduce the population, because otherwise we're doomed.

Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, perhaps we should control the population to ensure the survival of our environment

Although I agree that wild horses are a symbol of the American West, I also believe that it is the responsibility of Congress to ensure that these animals are managed, protected, and controlled in an effective manner.

...there is an optimal balance, depending on the manner of man's life, between the density of human population and the tolerances of nature. This balance, in the case of the United States would seem to me to have been surpassed when the American population reached, at a very maximum, two hundred million people, and perhaps a good deal less.

We have access to practical, ethical and scientifically established methods of birth control. So I think that is the most ethical way to reduce our population.

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