Maurice Strong Quotes

It's terrible to have to say this. World population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. This is so horrible to contemplate that we shouldn't even say it. But the general situation in which we are involved is lamentable.

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'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.

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

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.

Democracy cannot survive overpopulation.

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

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.

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

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.'

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

The optimum population is, then, less than the maximum.

We could also secure that the world's population should be stationary if we were not prevented by the political influence of churches which prefer war, pestilence, and famine to contraception.

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?

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.

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

More people need to inhabit this world.

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.

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.

We need to recognise that slowing population growth is one of the most cost-effective and reliable ways of easing pressure on our environment and securing a sustainable future for us all

The human population can no longer be allowed to grow in the same old uncontrollable way. If we do not take charge of our population size, then nature will do it for us and it is the poor people of the world who will suffer most

Either a species learns to control its own population, or something like disease, famine, war, will take care of the issue.

Europe is overpopulated, the world will soon be in the same condition, and if the self-reproduction of man is not rationalized... we shall have war.