Quotes About Population Growth

#1. Would food be considered an instrument of national power? ... Is the U.S. prepared to accept food rationing to help people who can't/won't control their population growth?

Henry A. Kissinger

#2. Some countries, like Saudi Arabia, where the population growth is very high, whereby you don't have the mortgage low yet. Still the demand outstrips supply by much.

Al-Waleed Bin Talal

#3. We've made some heroic efforts, but the Earth as a whole is in worse shape today than 30 years ago, ... There's been 30 more years of greenhouses gases, species extinctions and population growth.

Denis Hayes

#4. Excessive (population) growth may reduce output per worker, repress levels of living for the masses and engender strife

Confucius

#5. Those who fail to see that population growth and climate change are two sides of the same coin are either ignorant or hiding from the truth. These two huge environmental problems are inseparable and to discuss one while ignoring the other is irrational.

James Lovelock

#6. The period-effects model refers to influences specific to particular points in time - effects thought to be unique economic or demographic circumstances to which any observable fluctuations in population growth or decline may be attributed.

Brian A. Hoey

#7. I would be absolutely astounded if population growth and industrialisation and all the stuff we are pumping into the atmosphere hadn't changed the climatic balance. Of course it has. There is no valid argument for denial.

David Attenborough

#8. Frankly, I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

#9. When you factor in population growth, it's clear that the mobility model that we have today simply will not work tomorrow. Four billion clean cars on the road are still four billion cars, and a traffic jam with no emissions is still a traffic jam.

Bill Ford

#10. If we do not design policies to halt, and then reverse population growth, Nature by default will soon exact a most punishing solution

Fred Thompson

#11. Instead of a permit system or regulations, the Forest Service needs to reduce worldwide population growth to limit the number of visitors to wilderness.

Dave Barry

#12. Is it better that we manage population growth responsibly or should we to wait for nature to cull our numbers?

Phil Harding

#13. President Obama has tried to spin the paltry new job creation numbers as 'a step in the right direction.' But, clearly, the small growth in jobs isn't even keeping up with population growth, much less returning the workforce to a healthy level.

Bob Beauprez

#14. In the years to come, the combination of climate change and population growth could have a devastating effect on the planet and, needless to say, on humanity.

Nathaniel Philbrick

#15. Rapid population growth and technological innovation, combined with our lack of understanding about how the natural systems of which we are a part work, have created a mess.

David Suzuki

#16. Anyone whose major concern is the sanctity of human life is in effect, by leaving population growth unchecked, ensuring death by famine. Nature is pitiless, and if humans will not themselves limit population then they will have it done for them.

Christopher Hitchens

#17. By improving health, empowering women, population growth comes down.

Bill Gates

#18. A finite world can support only a finite population; therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero.

Garrett Hardin

#19. The future of mankind is going to be decided within the next two generations, and there are two absolute requisites: We must aim at a stable-state society [with limited population growth] and the destruction of nuclear stockpiles. ... Otherwise I don't see how we can survive much later than 2050.

Jacques Monod

#20. Population growth is straining the Earth's resources to the breaking point, and educating girls is the single most important factor in stabilizing that. That, plus helping women gain political and economic power and safeguarding their reproductive rights.

Al Gore

#21. Short of nuclear war itself, population growth is the gravest issue the world faces. If we do not act, the problem will be solved by famine, riots, insurrection and war.

Robert McNamara

#22. The impact of improving health is that the population growth goes down, and so you can educate more kids, feed more kids.

Bill Gates

#23. Population growth is the primary source of environmental damage.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau

#24. The key thing you can do to reduce population growth is actually improve health.

Bill Gates

#25. We need to recognise that slowing population growth is one of the most cost-effective and reliable ways of easing pressure on our environment and securing a sustainable future for us all

Lionel Shriver

#26. The good news is world population growth rate decreases systematically and is expected to reach zero by 2050, thanks to urbanisation and women's education.

Dan Shechtman

#27. It is environmental illiteracy and a complete lack of forward thinking to ignore the need to halt and then reverse population growth in the context of climate change, travel congestion, unaffordable housing, and resource depletion

Phil Harding

#28. The negative impact of population growth on all of our planetary ecosystems is becoming appallingly evident.

David Rockefeller

#29. The combination of population growth and the growth in consumption is a danger that we are not prepared for and something we will need global co-operation on.

Maurice Strong

#30. I meet so many that think population growth is a major problem in regard to climate change. But the number of children born per year in the world has stopped growing since 1990. The total number of children below 15 years of age in the world are now relatively stable around 2 billion.

Hans Rosling

#31. By 2060, India's economy is projected to be larger than China's because of its greater population growth. India is forecast to produce about one-quarter of world GDP from 2040 through the rest of this century.

Jeremy J. Siegel

#32. The world that you and I live in is increasingly challenged. Population growth, pollution, over-consumption, unsustainable patterns, social conflict, climate change, loss of nature ... these are not good stories.

Jack Dangermond

#33. As you improve health in a society, population growth goes down. You know, I thought it was ... before I learned about it, I thought it was paradoxical.

Bill Gates

#34. Of course I know our economic growth can't match our population growth so of course I know we'll all get poorer until we get that number down - don't tell me, tell the other idiots!

Bernard Chidzero

#35. Population growth and development place additional stress on the Nation's water infrastructure and its ability to sustain hard-won water quality gains.

Jerry Costello

#36. I believe that the emphasis on curbing population growth diverts attention from the more vital issue of pursuing policies that allow the population to take care of itself.

Muhammad Yunus

#37. The raging monster upon the land is population growth. In its presence, sustainability is but a fragile theoretical construct. To say, as many do, that the difficulties of nations are not due to people, but to poor ideology and land-use management is sophistic.

Pete Wilson

#38. We're the ones causing global warming. In fact, what we ought to be saying is population growth is a major cause of it, so I hope to have a T-shirt out very, very soon: Stop global warming, use condoms.

Mechai Viravaidya

#39. Human population growth is a problem in that most humans consume more than they need. The Earth's resources are now strained to sustain the needs and wants of the human population, which continues to escalate.

Sharon Gannon

#40. People often focus on the downsides of population growth but neglect the upsides. These upsides may even outweigh the downsides, making a larger population a good thing overall.

Ian Goldin

#41. When it comes to the population explosion, there are two questions on the table. One, is our population growth going to kill us all? And two, is there any ethical way to prevent that from happening?

Annalee Newitz

#42. Population growth and the proliferation of mega-cities around the world redefines the entire global security agenda.

Helmut Schmidt

#43. Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbaninzation, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power.

Stewart Brand

#44. Population growth is exceeding farmers' ability to keep up ... Our oldest enemy, hunger, is again at the door.

Lester R. Brown

#45. Human overconsumption is a greater problem than human population growth, and meat eating is a big part of that problem.

Sharon Gannon

#46. Eugenics has always been the escape valve of single payer socialized medicine. Havelock Ellis was writing about them as one and the same prior to the fin-de-siecle. Culling out of control population growth and the economic drain of the incurably sick has always been a part of socialized medicine.

A.E. Samaan

#47. If we do not voluntarily bring population growth under control in the next one or two decades, the nature will do it for us in the most brutal way, whether we like it or not.

Henry W. Kendall

#48. I've made a commitment that state spending in Vermont won't grow any more than the rate of inflation plus population growth.

James Douglas

#49. Most of the suicide hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, a place not lacking in wealth. But due to rapid population growth, the wealth per capita has fallen by about half in a generation.

Keith Henson

#50. Immigration is one of the leading contributors to population growth.

Paul Watson

#51. The first law of sustainability: population growth and/or growth in the rate of consumption of resources cannot be sustained

Albert Allen Bartlett

#52. Human population growth is probably the single most serious long-term threat to survival. We're in for a major disaster if it isn't curbed ... We have no option. If it isn't controlled voluntarily, it will be controlled involuntarily by an increase in disease, starvation and war.

Prince Philip

#53. A series of studies in the 1990s and 2000s revealed that as women gained more access to education, jobs, and birth control, they had fewer children. As a result, developed countries in western Europe, Japan, and the Americas were seeing zero or negative population growth.

Annalee Newitz

#54. As a woman leader, I thought I brought a different kind of leadership. I was interested in women's issues, in bringing down the population growth rate ... as a woman, I entered politics with an additional dimension - that of a mother.

Benazir Bhutto

#55. Environmentalists have been outspoken in their support of smaller family size and abortion rights as keys to reducing global warming. But when it comes to immigration, the single biggest contributor to population growth in the industrial world, they stand largely silent.

Gary Bauer

#56. One of the biggest challenges for the MENA region is unemployment coupled with high population growth rates. The World Bank is committed to supporting infrastructure projects that will help with job creation across the region.

Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair

#57. The rate of population growth in the United States is slightly below that required to reproduce itself.

Emanuel Celler

#58. Third world nations are producing too many children too fast ... it is time to ignore the controversy over family planning and cut out-of-control population growth ...

Al Gore

#59. We used to live in a world where the price of resources came down steadily, and now the world has changed. You have a great mismatch between finite resources and exponential population growth.

Jeremy Grantham

#60. It's perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology.

Carl Sagan

#61. In a time of continued population growth the consequences are devastating, needless to say. The Earth is too crowded already in terms of aura, and it's growing at 20 percent a decade.

Frederick Lenz

#62. To date, there has been no serious attempt in Western countries to use laws to control excessive population growth, although there exists ample authority under which population growth could be regulated.

John Holdren

#63. Child labor perpetuates poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, population growth, and other social problems.

Kailash Satyarthi

#64. It's coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It's not just climate change; it's sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now.

David Attenborough

#65. Just to keep up with population growth, on average our economy needs to be adding about 125,000 jobs per month.

Bob Beauprez

#66. Everybody talks about population growth and its disastrous effect on climate change, food security and resource depletion, but nobody does anything about it

Phil Harding

#67. A country's economic growth may be defined as a long-term rise in capacity to supply increasingly diverse economic goods to its population, this growing capacity based on advancing technology and the institutional and ideological adjustments that it demands.

Simon Kuznets

#68. The number of people with HIV receiving Medicare benefits has grown over time, reflecting growth in the size of the of the HIV positive population in the U.S. but also an increased lifespan for people with HIV due to antiretroviral medicines and other treatment advances.

David Mixner

#69. Access to governance has to be guaranteed with transparent systems that deliver responses and outcomes. The strengthening of democratic governance empowers the population to become active partners in the growth process.

Narendra Modi

#70. While growth may be unsustainable, de-growth is unstable.' Today's economic model cannot continue indefinitely. We live on a small planet. The population and the economy are growing, but the planet is not growing.

Anders Wijkman

#71. People used to think that more population was bad for growth. In this view, people are stomachs - they eat, leaving less for everyone else. But once we realize the importance of ideas in the economy, people become brain - they innovate, creating more for everyone else.

Alex Tabarrok

#72. Economic growth won't feed a growing population living on this finite planet

Phil Harding

#73. Although it's the second largest country in the world, our useful area has been reduced. Our immigration policy is disgusting: We plunder southern countries by depriving them of future leaders, and we want to increase our population to support economic growth.

David Suzuki

#74. The only real form of pollution is people. Any ecological system which does not include the reduction or stopping of growth of the population is eyewash

Heinz Wolff

#75. I also, as I think most people do, have a healthy instinct that if we upset the balance of nature, we are in all probability going to suffer a reaction. With world growth, and population as it is, this reaction must increase

Tony Blair

#76. Two-thirds of all growth takes place in cities because, by simple fact of population density, our urban spaces are perfect innovation labs. The modern metropolis is jam-packed. People are living atop one another; their ideas are as well.

Peter Diamandis

#77. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.

Enoch Powell

#78. A very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic.

E. O. Wilson

#79. The gains made by better management and technology are still being outpaced by the environmental impacts of population and economic growth. We are on an unsustainable course.

Klaus Topfer

#80. Living in an orgy of unrestrained consumption and economic growth accompanied by population expansion that ignores the carrying capacity of local environments will lead to disaster

Phil Harding

#81. It is quite possible that in only seventy years our population will amount to about eleven millions, over half of whom will be old age pensioners.

George Orwell

#82. Turkey has a young and growing population. Until recently, this was perceived as a problem, a burden that Turkey would bring to the E.U. But it is, in fact, an asset that can help the population deficit of the E.U. and the economic growth of Turkey.

Ali Babacan

#83. The chief cause for the impending collapse of the world - the cause sufficient in and by itself - is the enormous growth of the human population: the human flood. The worst enemy of life is too much life: the excess of human life.

Pentti Linkola

#84. Centrally planned economies are upended by out of control population. Their escape valve is eugenics.

A.E. Samaan

#85. The top 10 per cent of the US population appropriated 91 per cent of income growth between 1989 and 2006, while the top 1 per cent took 59 per cent.

Ha-Joon Chang

#86. With the rather stable ratio of labor force to total population, a high rate of increase in per capita product means a high rate of increase in product per worker; and, with average hours of work declining, it means still higher growth rates in product per man-hour.

Simon Kuznets

#87. Less cars on the road means productivity and jobs growth, as it allows for the more efficient movement of goods and services and encourages greater urban population density.

Anthony Albanese

#88. Global food insecurity is increasing ... the slim excess of growth in food production over population is narrowing.

Lester R. Brown

#89. We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can't support many more people.

Nina Fedoroff

#90. Of course, a positive growth rate might be taken as evidence that a population is below its optimum.

Garrett Hardin

#91. The environmentalist's dream is an egalitarian society based on: rejection of economic growth, a smaller population, eating lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less, and sharing a much lower level of resources much more equally.

Aaron Wildavsky

#92. It is impossible to anticipate all of the misdeeds engendered by the universal conflict of human passions. They multiply at a compound rate with the growth in population and the interlacing of particular interests that cannot be directed with geometrical precision towards the public utility.

Cesare Beccaria

#93. We think there is an ecological problem, but the real problem is irresponsible growth of human population.

Jaggi Vasudev

#94. Another cause of change, one less noticeable but fundamental, is the modern growth of population closely connected with scientific and medical discoveries. It is interesting that the United Nations has set up a special Commission to study this question.

Emily Greene Balch

#95. India offers exciting business opportunities owing to the growth in corporate travel and a significant middle-class population waiting to explore the world. To begin with, Travelex is setting up eight city centre branches in metros and other major cities including tourist destinations.

Lloyd Dorfman

#96. In Delaware, the largest growth in population is Indian-Americans moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I'm not joking.

Joe Biden

#97. The view which he has given of human life has a melancholy hue,
but he feels conscious that he has drawn these dark tints from a
conviction that they are really in the picture, and not from a jaundiced
eye or an inherent spleen of disposition.

Thomas Robert Malthus

#98. Job growth well in excess of population increase would be a very good thing if it were only that easy.

Bob Beauprez

#99. between 1885 and 1908 the pursuit of growth and profits cost the lives of 6 million individuals (at least 20 per cent of the Congo's population).

Yuval Noah Harari

#100. Alaska's chief attractions are: (a) its small and insignificant human population, thanks to the miserable climate; and (b) its large and magnificent wildlife population, thanks to (a). Both of these attractions are being rapidly diminished, however, by (c) the Law of Growth and Space-Age Sleaze.

Edward Abbey