Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?

Thicken Population.

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.

You might argue that I make the rounds no matter what year it is, but sometimes the human race likes to crank things up a little. They increase the production of bodies and their escaping souls.

It seems to me, correct me if I'm wrong, that there are an awful lot of people in Manhattan. And it's getting worse.

Man's natural life span, 75 to 90 years or so, has not increased. It is the number of us who manage to attain it that has increased.

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.

I wasn't used to living crowded cheek by jowl with numbers of other people, as was customary here. People ate, slept, and frequently copulated, crammed into tiny, stifling cottages, lit and warmed by smoky peat fires. The only thing they didn't do together was bathe - largely because they didn't bathe.

Towns are full of people, houses full of tenants, hotels full of guests, trains full of travelers, cafés full of customers, parks full of promenaders, consulting-rooms of famous doctors full of patients, theatres full of spectators, and beaches full of bathers. What previously was, in general, no problem, now begins to be an everyday one, namely, to find room.

What I can say is, is that if you do a poll, and one of the worldwide polling companies did this, and they asked people in 50 countries, "Would you like to come to America," it's about 700 million would come next year. We would double our population.

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!

Most people are not updated. 50 years ago 1 in 5 children died before age 5, now only 1 in 20!

Asia: Four little letters, three billion little people.

People die all around us all the time. Drop like flies. Overdose. Aids. Sometimes they kill themselves. People come. They go. Dying is the same as rehab or moving back to Missouri. It just means I won't be seeing them again

it is only in statistics that people die by the millions. Each person dies individually, in his own predicament.

It is hard for anyone under twenty to realise that death has already assigned them a number, which is going to come up one day.

This is a big world. Billions - rapidly increasing billions - of people live outside our borders. Obviously, a great number of them, being much poorer than they think most of us are, look enviously over those borders and would like, if they could, to come here.

Most people think that aging is fatal and scientific data shows that that's not true.

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.

In England, the population explosion can be linked very clearly with the enclosure of the commons that uprooted the peasants from their land. In India, it was the same thing: the population increased at the end of the 18th century when the British took over and Indian lands were colonized. Instead of the land feeding Indian people it started to feed the British empire. So we had destitution. Destitute people who don't have their own land to feed themselves can only feed themselves by having larger numbers, therefore they multiply. It's the rational response of a dispossessed people.

Both in their origins and effects, boredom and stuffy air resemble each other. They are usually generated whenever a large number of people gather together in a closed room.

It is obvious that the best qualities in man must atrophy in a standing-room-only environment.

That there are billions of people over 60kg weight on this planet is recklessness.

Iraq has lost 5 percent of its population, a number that in the U.S. would equal 14 million people.

The more people we have on our team. the less room there is in the elevator and the more complicated everything gets.