Daniel Patrick Moynihan Quotes

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

I am one of the unpraised, unrewarded millions without whom Statistics would be a bankrupt science. It is we who are born, who marry, who die, in constant ratios.

In the 1960s, 110 countries had averages of six or more children per family.

I'm a big fan of huge populations of people, so you'd think with 300 million people in the country, you don't even have to please 1% to be phenomenally successful.

Demography is destiny.

Israel, contrary to most of the West, has a high fertility rate, so there's a lot of young people in Israel. Most families have three kids as opposed to one or two, so a big proportion of the population is under 30.

Figures tell us there are already more people on earth than we need to move even the heaviest piano.

The population forecast for the United States in 1970 is 170 million. The population forecast for Russia alone in 1970 is 251 million. The implications are clear.

The biggest development in reproductive biology is the birth-control pill. Nobody ever talks about it, but look at the consequences: demographics; aging populations; the sinking population of Europe, Japan; immigration. It's incredible.

Today, American women bear an average of 2.2 children that live to adulthood. Across most of Europe, women bear even fewer young.

Our fifty principal cities contain 39.3 per cent of our entire German population, and 45.8 per cent of the Irish. Our ten larger cities only nine per cent of the entire population, but 23 per cent of the foreign.

Russia contains one fourth of the inhabitants of all Europe, and one half of the entire number of Israelites.

Populations factors are indeed critical in and often determine and solve violent conflict in developing areas. Religious, social and racial differences, migration, rapid population growth, differential levels of knowledge and skills, rural/urban differences, population pressure and the spatial location of population in relation to resources, in this rough order of importance, all appear to be important contributions to conflict and violence …. Clearly conflicts which are regarded in primarily political terms often have demographic roots …. Where population size is greater than available resources, or is expanding more rapidly than the available resources, there is a tendency toward internal disorders and violence and, sometimes, disruptive international policies or violence.... In developing countries, the burden of population factors, added to others, will weaken unstable governments, often only marginally effective in good times, and open the way to extremist regimes

Demography drives the economy.

The U.S. is still in a pretty good spot, especially relative to other advanced countries. The aging of our population is not as pronounced as almost anyone else's.

I just feel that sooner or later, the sheer potential of the demographics of India, which is 1.25 billion people, will eventually be very attractive to the entertainment industry.

This is a full country. I think 16 million Dutchmen are about enough.

I have always found it difficult to wrap my head around population policies.

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!

Remember, in China when you are one in a million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.

The British are weak in numbers, we are weak in spite of our numbers.

The good thing is, we have household formation in this country. We have a country where I don't know whether it's a million households a year or more, but good form.

There's nothing more political than sex. The church has had its hand on our crotch for more than 2,000 years, and the government is moving in that direction.

We're up at almost seven billion people on the planet and most of that growth has been in the developing world.

It is a problem, not clear in my mind, that [a society without government, as among our Indians] is not the best. But I believe it to be inconsistent with any great degree of population.