Uncontrolled Growth Quotes

… 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.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

knowledge began freely replicating and quickly assumed a life of its own.

Man has mounted science, and is now run away with. I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of men. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Someday science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world.

Two Million Wild Horses

Growth that adds volume without improving productivity is fat. Growth that diminishes productivity is cancer.

America is in a runaway-train position and dragging all the world with it. It's grotesquely mentally ill.

Our technology has already outstripped our ability to control it.

He was a clot looking for a place to happen, a splinter of bone hunting a soft organ to puncture, a lonely lunatic cell looking for a mate - they would set up housekeeping and raise themselves a cozy little malignant tumor.

Once a viral program gets started, there is nothing to stop it.

The spark from a tiny star can ignite the plains.

The economy is a thoughtless weather system.

Globalisation feels like a runaway train, out of control.

For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!

Want is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the sky. But needs, from one day to the next, are few enough to fit in a bucket, with room enough left to rattle like brittle brush in a dry wind.

Science grows like a weed every year.

Give me 200 active 2-year-olds and I could conquer the world.

The corporation is an out-of-control Frankenstein.

You need not fear my extinction. Fear my proliferation! I've already reproduced!

They build machines they can't control, and bury the waste in a great big hole.

Ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.

I started inventing things, and then I couldn't stop, like beavers, which I know about. People think they cut down trees so they can build dams, but in reality it's because their teeth never stop growing, and if they didn't constantly file them down by cutting through all of those trees, their teeth would start to grow into their own faces, which would kill them. That's how my brain was.

My backyard was replete with madness, it just grew indigenously in South Florida.

Why, who cries out on pride that can therein tax any private party? Doth it not flow as hugely as the sea till the weary very means do ebb?

Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange, and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.