Quotes
Quotes about Population
The agricultural population, says Cato, produces the bravest men, the most valiant soldiers, and a class of citizens the least given of all to evil designs.... A bad bargain is always a ground for repentance.
Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
It is not necessarily true that averaging the averages of different populations gives the average of the combined population.
Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
It is not necessarily true that averaging the averages of different populations gives the average of the combined population.
Education...has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
It is your mind that matters economically, as much or more than your mouth or hands. In the long run, the most important economic effect of population size and growth is the contribution of additional people to our stock of useful knowledge. And this contribution is large enough in the long run to overcome all the costs of population growth.
The increase in the world's population represents our victory against death...
The standard of living has risen along with the size of the world's population since the beginning of recorded time. There is no convincing economic reason why these trends toward a better life should not continue indefinitely.
Greater consumption due to increase in population and growth of income heightens scarcity and induces price run-ups. A higher price represents an opportunity that leads inventors and businesspeople to seek new ways to satisfy the shortages. Some fail, at cost to themselves. A few succeed, and the final result is that we end up better off than if the original shortage problems had never arisen. That is, we need our problems, though this does not imply that we should purposely create additional problems for ourselves.
The most important benefit of population size and growth is the increase it brings to the stock of useful knowledge. Minds matter economically as much as, or more than, hands or mouths.
The growing complexity of science, technology, and organization does not imply either a growing knowledge or a growing need for knowledge in the general population. On the contrary, the increasingly complex processes tend to lead to increasingly simple and easily understood products. The genius of mass production is precisely in its making more products more accessible, both economically and intellectually to more people.
We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.
Half the American population no longer reads newspapers: plainly, they are the clever half.
The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the populationâthe intelligent ones or the fools? I think we can agree it's the fools, no matter where you go in this world, it's the fools that form the overwhelming majority.
The hungry world cannot be fed until and unless the growth of its resources and the growth of its population come into balance. Each man and woman--and each nation--must make decisions of conscience and policy in the face of this great problem.
Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio.
The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force.
The ideal of self-advancement which the civilizing west offers to backward populations brings with it the plague of individual frustration. All the advantages brought by the West are ineffectual substitutes for the sheltering and soothing anonymity of communal existence.
Every politician, clergyman, educator, or physician, in short, anyone dealing with human individuals, is bound to make grave mistakes if he ignores these two great truths of population zoology: (1) no two individuals are alike, and (2) both environment and genetic endowment make a contribution to nearly every trait.
