Peter Lynch Quotes

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.

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

… 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.

With an estimated population of nine billion people by 2050, we cannot continue to consume resources at the same rate and maintain our quality of life.

There are a lot of kids in the world. People seem to keep having them.

We are not overpopulated in an absolute sense; we've got the technology for 10 billion, probably 15 billion people, to live on this planet and live good lives. What we haven't done is developed our technology.

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

A billion could live off the earth; 6 billion living as we do is far too many, and you run out of planet in no time.

Man tends to increase at a greater rate than his means of subsistence.

There are probably already too many people on the planet.

I've got cousins galore. Mexicans just spread all their seeds. And the women just pop them out.

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

We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can't support many more people.

I've been working a lot with Dick Smith on overpopulation.

There's too many people in the world.

We have to stabilize the population of this planet.

The best "gift" anyone can give to humankind is to remain birth-free. It is a SIN for any person to birth while earth births exceed deaths. For what purpose would the world need more than 50,000 new Homo sapiens every year?

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.

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.

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!

It is a paradox of Life that all species breed past mere replacement. Any paradise of plenty soon fills to become paradise no more.

One always returns to the fact that there are just too many of us, the population continues to rise and it's unsustainable.

The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.

I get upset when so many people say there are all sorts of problems in Africa and India where they have these big families. They don't realize that 10 children in rural Tanzania will use less natural resources in a year than one middle class American child. People don't think like that.

I have no doubt that the fundamental problem the planet faces is the enormous increase in the human population