Top 46 Garrett Hardin Quotes
#1. Garrett Hardin. Parenthood: Right or Privilege? Science Magazine.
Bob Marshall
#2. Malthus has been buried many times, and Malthusian scarcity with him. But as Garrett Hardin remarked, anyone who has to be reburied so often cannot be entirely dead.
Herman E. Daly
#3. No one should be able to enter a wilderness by mechanical means.
Garrett Hardin
#4. The morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed.
Garrett Hardin
#5. Why are ecologists and environmentalists so feared and hated? This is because in part what they have to say is new to the general public, and the new is always alarming.
Garrett Hardin
#6. It takes five years for a willing person's mind to change. Have patience with yourself and others when treading in an area protected by a taboo.
Garrett Hardin
#7. The mathematics of biological reproduction is logically identical with the mathematics of usury. Money earns interest, animals have babies. In
Garrett Hardin
#8. However, I think the major opposition to ecology has deeper roots than mere economics; ecology threatens widely held values so fundamental that they must be called religious.
Garrett Hardin
#10. The only thing we can really count on in this uncertain world is human unreliability itself.
Garrett Hardin
#11. The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them.
Garrett Hardin
#12. The social arrangements that produce responsibility are arrangements that create coercion, of some sort.
Garrett Hardin
#13. Numeracy: 1. The art of putting numbers to things, that is, assigning amounts to variables in order that practical decisions may be reach. 2. That aspect of education (beyond mere literacy) which takes account of quantitative aspects of reality.
Garrett Hardin
#14. The individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers.
Garrett Hardin
#15. You can never do merely one thing. The law applies to any action that changes something in a complex system. The point is that an action taken to alleviate a problem will trigger several effects, some of which may offset or even negate the one intended.
Garrett Hardin
#16. It is now widely believed (and, I think, correctly believed) that the survival of a nation under modern competitive conditions depends on broadening the electorate's competency in numerate matters. Numeracy
Garrett Hardin
#17. People are the quintessential element in all technology ... Once we recognize the inescapable human nexus of all technology our attitude toward the reliability problem is fundamentally changed.
Garrett Hardin
#18. Using the commons as a cesspool does not harm the general public under frontier conditions, because there is no public, the same behavior in a metropolis is unbearable.
Garrett Hardin
#19. An attack on values is inevitably seen as an act of subversion.
Garrett Hardin
#21. The only kind of coercion I recommend is mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected.
Garrett Hardin
#22. In a finite world this means that the per capita share of the world's goods must steadily decrease.
Garrett Hardin
#23. Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed.
Garrett Hardin
#24. But it is no good using the tongs of reason to pull the Fundamentalists' chestnuts out of the fire of contradiction. Their real troubles lie elsewhere.
Garrett Hardin
#25. A finite world can support only a finite population; therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero.
Garrett Hardin
#27. In an approximate way, the logic of commons has been understood for a long time, perhaps since the discovery of agriculture or the invention of private property in real estate.
Garrett Hardin
#28. But as population became denser, the natural chemical and biological recycling processes became overloaded, calling for a redefinition of property rights.
Garrett Hardin
#29. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.
Garrett Hardin
#30. Moreover, the practical recommendations deduced from ecological principles threaten the vested interests of commerce; it is hardly surprising that the financial and political power created by these investments should be used sometimes to suppress environmental impact studies.
Garrett Hardin
#33. Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution.
Garrett Hardin
#34. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights describes the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society. It follows that any choice and decision with regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the family itself, and cannot be made by anyone else.
Garrett Hardin
#35. Continuity is at the heart of conservatism: ecology serves that heart.
Garrett Hardin
#36. A technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality.
Garrett Hardin
#37. Economists (and others) who are satisfied with nature-free equations develop a dangerous hubris about the potency of our species
Garrett Hardin
#38. In a competitive world of limited resources, total freedom of individual action is intolerable
Garrett Hardin
#39. Fundamentalists are panicked by the apparent disintegration of the family, the disappearance of certainty and the decay of morality. Fear leads them to ask, if we cannot trust the Bible, what can we trust?
Garrett Hardin
#40. To say that we mutually agree to coercion is not to say that we are required to enjoy it, or even to pretend we enjoy it.
Garrett Hardin
#41. Throughout history, human exploitation of the earth has produced this progression: colonize-destroy-move on.
Garrett Hardin
#42. Of course, a positive growth rate might be taken as evidence that a population is below its optimum.
Garrett Hardin
#43. The optimum population is, then, less than the maximum.
Garrett Hardin
#44. Religious reasons, which is no reason. I notice Skeptic had a review of Dennett's book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Religious reasons amount to what Dennett terms "skyhooks." Do you believe in skyhooks? I don't.
Garrett Hardin
#45. It is a mistake to think that we can control the breeding of mankind in the long run by an appeal to conscience.
Garrett Hardin
#46. A coldly rationalist individualist can deny that he has any obligation to make sacrifices for the future.
Garrett Hardin
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