Great Throughts Treasury

"Mere facts minus theory - or worse, facts flying in the face of theory - are the stock in trade of the professional obfuscator."

"Money is both the kind word and the gun. If the firepower is not great enough to persuade the targeted person, increase the offer."

"Never suffer a delusion to live!"

"Noble intentions are a poor excuse for stupid action. Man is the only species that calls some suicidal actions 'noble'. The rest of creation knows better."

"Now when people say, 'You can't stop progress!', they generally mean, 'You can't stop material progress.'"

"Of every well-meant proposal, ecologists ask a standard question: 'And then what?'"

"OK, the hype (and my inbox) has gotten totally out of control. This is, after all, about an untested theory that may or may not turn out to be true. But, on the other hand, it's pretty damn amusing. Mostly, all this media attention just makes me want to go hide for fifteen minutes, and I hope to come back to see physicists pondering this E8 theory, despite the hype."

"One of the most reliable things in the world is human unreliability."

"One world cannot endure - not in a universe programmed by natural selection."

"Multiculturalists, in effect, urge that we eat borscht with chopsticks."

"Never globalize a problem if it can possibly be dealt with locally."

"Narrow-minded economists emphasize 'production' and virtually ignore what happens to the source of nature's resources, as well as to nature's sink, which has to absorb the unwanted, so-called 'by-produces' or 'production'."

"Our contemporary anthropocentric bias is rooted in most surviving religions' view of our place in nature."

"Overpopulation can be avoided only if borders are secure; otherwise poor and overpopulated nations will export their excess to richer and less populated nations."

"Perhaps the simplest summary of... man's population problems is this: the commons, if justifiable at all, is justifiable only under conditions of low-population density."

"Population does not grow globally; it grows very locally, at each spot occupied by a fertile woman."

"Populations, like potholes, are produced locally and, unlike atmospheric pollution, remain local - unless some people are so unwise as to globalize them by permitting population excesses to migrate into the better-endowed countries."

"Purely voluntary control of reproduction [selects] for failure as a means of population control."

"So long as demand increases exponentially, solving a material shortage is impossible."

"Sustainable development can be defended because an adult can continue to develop his or her intelligence without any growth in body weight."

"'Sustainable growth' is an oxymoron."

"The ecological thinker is haunted by the consequences of time."

"The favorable treatment of optimists in a capitalistic, commercial society meshes well with the facts of biology."

"The financial world habitually speaks of yearly 'production' of oil. But the unvarnished truth is this: we human beings have never produced so much as a single barrel of petroleum. Only nature produces oil - and at a very slow rate."

"The interest of posterity can be brought into the reckoning of ethics if we abandon the idea of the sanctity of (present) life as an absolute ethical ideal, replacing it with the idea of the sanctity of the carrying capacity."

"The major ways in which ecology and economics differ is in their attitudes toward (a) limits, (b) discounting the future, and (c) dealing with irreversible changes."

"The maximum is not the optimum."

"The population problem has no technical solution: It requires a fundamental extension in morality."

"The morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed."

"The myth of the limitless world is but one of the many myths that have grown up in the protective shadow of the insufficiently examined idea of progress."

"The more successful a continuously growing population is in extracting wealth from nature-the-resource, the sooner it will suffer from the intransigence of the unintended creation, nature-the-sink."

"The only kind of coercion I recommend is mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected."

"The proficiencies that education produces [fall] into three categories: literacy, numeracy, and ecolacy. The key question of the ecolate person is this: 'And then what?'"

"The principal selfish interest in unimpeded immigration is easy to identify: it is the interest of the employers of cheap labor, particularly that need for degrading jobs."

"The quality of life and the quantity of it are inversely related."

"The reward determines the outcome."

"The United States is surely in the mature phase now. There is no rational excuse for encouraging an immigration rate that was appropriate to, and beneficial in, our juvenile phase."

"The three filters operate through these particular questions: Literacy: What are the words? Numeracy: What are the numbers? Ecolacy: And then what?"

"This is an all-or-nothing kind of theory - it's either going to be exactly right, or spectacularly wrong. I'm the first to admit this is a long shot. But it ain't over till the LHC sings."

"There should not be the slightest communal concern when a woman elects to destroy the life of her thousandth-of-an-ounce embryo. But all society should rise up in alarm when it hears that a baby that is not wanted is about to be born."

"Those who make the most propaganda for dismantling the nation through immigration are the ones whose jobs are not in the least threatened by a massive invasion of immigrants."

"Thou shalt not transgress the carrying capacity."

"To couple the concept of freedom to breed with the belief that everyone born has an equal right to the commons is to lock the world into a tragic course of action."

"To condemn the coercion of the individual by the group is to reject democracy."

"Tragedy is the price of freedom in the commons... In other words, in a crowded world survival requires that some freedom be given up."

"To survive indefinitely in good shape a nation must take as its advisers people who can see farther than investment bankers."

"Under competition, low living standards drive out high."

"Trouble comes when man steps into the system of nature and tries to increase productivity without limit."

"Unity within each sovereignty; diversity among sovereignties."

"We are limited by the basic theorem of ecology, 'We can never do merely one thing'."