Great Throughts Treasury

"We can't cure a shortage by increasing the supply."

"We are not faced with a single global population problem, but rather 187 separate national population problems."

"We climb mountains that stand not in our way - and thus discover new ways to happiness."

"We see only what we have names for."

"What features of your daily life do you expect to be improved by a further increase in population?"

"Westerners, with their cherished tradition of free speech and open discussion, would be embarrassed to say... 'We will not discuss population because it is under a taboo.'"

"We summarize the situation by saying: 'There is a shortage of food.' Why don't we say, 'There is a longage of people'?"

"Whenever the scale is shifted upward, one should be alert for possible contradictions of the conventional wisdom that served so well when the unit was smaller."

"We should ask ourselves what repression keeps us from discussing a subject as important as immigration... He who does so is promptly charged with isolationism, bigotry, prejudice, ethnocentrism, chauvinism, and selfishness."

"Whenever a community consists of too many people for the resources available to it, heavy mortality can then actually improve the conditions of life for the lucky survivors."

"Why is it so difficult for politicians to take the long view? ...the [electoral] time horizon of most politicians is no more than five years away. Proximite goals drive out distant goals."

"With no sign of cessation of population growth, diseconomies of scale are sure to become a 'growth industry'."

"With the coinage of 'sustainable development,' the defenders of the unsteady state have won a few more years' moratorium from the painful process of thinking."

"Without global sovereignty there can be no global solution to population problems."