Isaac Asimov Quotes

I think as resources become more dear, we really need to consider population.

The destruction of our environment and resources cannot be stemmed unless the growth of the world's population is stemmed and ultimately reduced.

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

The key to understanding overpopulation is not population density but the numbers of people in an area relative to its resources and the capacity of the environment to sustain human activities; that is, to the area’s carrying capacity. When is an area overpopulated? When its population can’t be maintained without rapidly depleting nonrenewable resources.... By this standard, the entire planet and virtually every nation is already vastly overpopulated

My first policy move would be to try to get a conversation going in the US about what people stand for and what we really want. Do we want to keep adding people to the world and to our country until we move to a battery-chicken kind of existence and then collapse? Or do we want to think hard about what really is valuable to us, and figure out how many people we can supply that to sustainably?

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

In what I think is the most serious problem the world faces, which is the population explosion, we will come I think to a time when measures that are not even dreamt of now will become necessary.

We know it is impossible to go on finding, moving and wasting oil, leveling forests, paving land, dumping poisons, and multiplying our numbers. A new way of life, a new set of thoughts must be found.

All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people and harder - and ultimately impossible to solve - with ever more people.

The problem of a rising population destroying more than four tons of soil for every human already alive needs to find its way into corporate board rooms if we are to enjoy future financial, economic and political stability.

The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.

Can you name an environmental problem that would NOT be easier to solve with fewer people, or harder (and ultimately impossible) with more? Nobody can.

You probably need 1/10 of the world's population for us to continue to exist. There's just too many damn people. You have to somehow get us from 7 billion people to... I don't know what the magic number is, but I imagine at some point, that will happen. And I don't know about you, but I don't think I'm making the cut.

In my Nobel lecture, I suggested we had until the year 2000 to tame the population monster, and then food shortages would take us under. Now I believe we have a little longer.

I don't think anybody has the right to a huge family. There's already more people on the planet than our natural resources can even support, and if everybody were to have a high standard of living, we need three or four or five new planets to provide the resources. And this cannot be, so something has to change.

Overconsumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face today

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.

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

We're the ones causing global warming. In fact, what we ought to be saying is population growth is a major cause of it, so I hope to have a T-shirt out very, very soon: Stop global warming, use condoms.

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

How many people is the earth able to sustain?

We must alert and organise the world's people to pressure world leaders to take specific steps to solve the two root causes of our environmental crises - exploding population growth and wasteful consumption of irreplaceable resources. Overconsumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face today.

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.

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

This growing poverty in the midst of growing population constitutes a permanent menace to peace. And not only to peace, but also to democratic institutions and personal liberty For overpopulation is not compatible with freedom.