Henry David Thoreau Quotes

When I was born, there were three billion people on the planet.

In only 37 years, our population will grow by a number equivalent to all the people in the world at the beginning of World War II.

Cities are 2% of the earth's crust, but they are 50% of the world's population.

It's human nature to keep doing something as long as it's pleasurable and you can succeed at it - which is why the world population continues to double every 40 years.

The world must be peopled!

More people need to inhabit this world.

Anyway, the fascinating thing was that I read in National Geographic that there are more people alive now than have died in all of human history. In other words, if everyone wanted to play Hamlet at once, they couldn’t, because there aren’t enough skulls!

To have six billion people on Earth, two billion of whom are carrying around a warped view of you? That has to register.

Today's population of adolescents and young adults is the largest in our nation's history.

What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

There's too many people in the world.

What's the third largest nation in the world after China and India? It's the Facebook nation - 430 million people on Facebook.

The perpetual tendency of the race of man to increase beyond the means of subsistence is one of the general laws of animated nature, which we can have no reason to expect to change.

We have to stabilize the population of this planet.

Since the growing worldwide population is increasingly straining the world's supply of food, minerals, and water and sharpening international tensions, the reduction of the rate of consumption of resources by the affluent and the reduction of current world population growth rates have become imperative. People have the duty to consider the impact on the total world community of their decisions regarding childbearing and should have access to information and appropriate means to limit their fertility

The whole surface of our globe can afford room and support only to such a number of all sorts of creatures, and by their doubling, trebling or any other multiplication of their kind, they must starve or devour one another. The world is now well-peopled ... neither too full nor too empty and if too many the length of life will be reduced …. plague and war may be, not only a just punishment of the sins of men, but also a wise means to keep the balance of mankind even.

As countries birth rates declined, … their likelihood of civil conflict also tended to decline.

In most slums and cities in developing states, population growth is outpacing the ability of the growth in pollution and sewage. Such unmet expectations in over-crowded cities can be the catalyst for civil conflict.

There is room enough indoors in New York City for the whole 1963 world's population to enter, with room enough inside for all hands to dance the twist in average nightclub proximity.

Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase.... the human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive.

… human population growth within the ecosystem was closely analogous to the growth of malignant tumor cells within an organism: that man was acting like a cancer on the biosphere. The multiplication of human numbers certainly seems wild and uncontrolled... Four million a month - the equivalent of the population of Chicago... We seem to be doing all right at the moment; but if you could ask cancer cells, I suspect they would think they were doing fine. But when the organism dies, so do they; and for our own, selfish, practical, utilitarian reasons, I think we should be careful about how we influence the rest of the ecosystem.

Population pressure is the ultimate cause of every war.

The imperatives of the population explosion, … almost inevitably will lessen our belief in the sanctity of the individual human life

Nature—pitiless in a pitiless universe—is certainly not concerned with the survival of Americans or, for that matter, of any of the two billion people now inhabiting the earth.

So far, the United States knows nothing of the difficulties of over-population; and historic realities of a nature to hamper the free play of economic forces exist only in a very limited degree. Quite the reverse is true in Europe.