Short Quotes are very useful as automatically added footnotes to an email or mobile phone text.
Roger Martin. b 1941
“It is not much use reducing our carbon footprints if we keep on increasing the number of feet.” Roger Martin. Former diplomat and Retired President of Population Matters.
David Attenborough. B. 1926. Naturalist, broadcaster ,former controller of BBC Two and patron of Population Matters.
“The human population can no longer be allowed to grow in the same old uncontrolled way. If we do not take charge of our population size, then nature will do it for us and it is the poor people of the world who will suffer most.”
“All environmental problems become harder — and ultimately impossible — to solve with ever more people.”
“Anyone who thinks you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist”.
“Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, perhaps it’s time we [should] control the population to allow the survival of the environment.”
Jonathon Porritt b.!950
“Population raises all these questions about religion, about culture, about male dominance in the world — and (people) get very uncomfortable about that.” Jonathon Porritt . President of Population Matters .Founder Director of the Forum for the Future and former Chair of the United Kingdom Sustainable Development Commission.
Leilani Munter b. 1984 woman racing car drive and patron of Population Matters
“The ultimate intelligence of our species will be determined by whether we face our population issue and get it under control, or continue to sweep it under the rug because it’s an uncomfortable conversation. The future of life on Earth depends on us doing the former.”
Jane Goodall. Founder, Institute and United Nations Messenger of Peace. Patron of Population Matters.
“It’s our population growth that underlies just about every single one of the problems that we’ve inflicted on the planet. If there were just a few of us, then the nasty things we do wouldn’t really matter and Mother Nature would take care of it — but there are so many of us.”
Aristotle – Philosopher 384-322 BC.
“One would have thought that that it was even more necessary to limit population than property….The neglect of this subject, which in existing states is so common, is a never failing cause of poverty among the citizens; and poverty is the parent of both revolution and crime.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson – Writer -1803-1882
“If government knew how, I should like to see it check – not multiply – the population.”
Jawaharial Nehru – Indian Prime Minister – 1889-1964
“Some of these (Asian) countries, like India, far from needing a bigger population, would be better off with fewer people.”
Martin Luther King 1929-1968 Civil Rights Activist USA
“There is no human circumstance more tragic than the persisting existence of a harmful condition for which a remedy is readily available. Family planning, to relate population to world resources, is possible, practical and necessary. Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess. What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and education of the billions who are its victims.”
Spike Milligan – Comedian 1918-2002
“Overpopulation is a serious issue. The human race will soon have to get used to 12 in a room.”
Gore Vidal – writer and intellectual, 1925-2012
“Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every 40 years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.”
Bertrand Russell – philosopher, 1872-1970
“I do not pretend that birth control is the only way in which population can be kept from increasing. There are others, which, one must suppose, opponents of birth control would prefer.”
Dr.Henry W. Kendall -1926-1999 Nobel Laureate
“If we don’t halt population growth with justice and compassion, it will be done for us by nature, brutally and without pity — and we will leave a ravaged world.”
UNICEF Report, 1992
“Family planning could bring more benefits to more people at less cost than any other single technology now available to the human race”