Population Quotes - Page 33

• As long as a population can be induced to believe in a supernatural hereafter, it can be oppressed and controlled. People will put up with all sorts of tyranny, poverty, and painful treatment if they're convinced that they'll eventually escape to some resort in the sky where lifeguards are superfluous and the pool never closes. Moreover, the faithful are usually willing to risk their skins in whatever military adventure their government may currently be promoting.

  Tom Robbins

  Military, Believe, Adventure

  Tom Robbins (2003). “Skinny Legs and All”, p.356, Bantam

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• It's a common mistake for vacationing Americans to assume that everyone around them is French and therefore speaks no English whatsoever. [...] An experienced traveler could have told by looking at my shoes that I wasn't French. And even if I were French, it's not as if English is some mysterious tribal dialect spoken only by anthropologists and a small population of cannibals.

  David Sedaris

  Mistake, Shoes, Dialect

  David Sedaris (2000). “Me talk pretty one day”

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• Our object must be to bring our territory into harmony with the numbers of our population.

  Adolf Hitler

  Numbers, Territory, Harmony

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• You should make her call you ‘Miss Georgina,’” added Hugh with a mocking southern drawl. “Or at least ‘ma’am.’” Niphon’s presence and Jerome’s lecture had put me in a grouchy mood. “I’m not doing any mentoring. She’s so gungho to take on the world’s male population, she doesn’t even need me.” The three men exchanged more smirks. Cody made some hissing and meowing sounds, scratching at the air. "This isn’t funny,” I said. "Sure it is,” said Cody.

  Richelle Mead

  Men, Southern Drawl, Air

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• Human use, population, and technology have reached that certain stage where mother Earth no longer accepts our presence with silence.

  Dalai Lama

  Inspirational, Mother, Technology

  Dalai Lama XIV (1995). “My Tibet”, p.80, Univ of California Press

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• UN studies conducted in more than forty developing countries show that the birth rate falls as women gain equality... I believe income-earning opportunities that empower poor women ... will have more impact on curbing population growth that the current system of "encouraging" family planning practices through intimidation tactics.. Family planning should be left to the family.

  Muhammad Yunus

  Country, Believe, Fall

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• Under the ground seep the toxins of the population that lives above. If you have to, you will eat roots and earthworms. It is always night. Candles burn in lanterns made from tin cans. When it is nighttime up above, you can crawl out, but only for a little while. You feel ashamed of your matted hair, your torn clothes, the dirt on your face. Who would want to speak to you? They are all shiny and pretty. They have parents and house with gardens. What do you have? The earth. Whole handfuls of it. The lizard people with their slit eyes and scaly skin. Your loneliness. Your longing.

  Francesca Lia Block

  Loneliness, Eye, Night

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• Thankfully the rest of the world assumed that the Irish were crazy, a theory that the Irish themselves did nothing to debunk. They had somehow got it into their heads that each fairy lugged around a pot of gold with him wherever he went. While it was true that LEP had a ransom fund, because of its officers' high-risk occupation, no human had ever taken a chunk of it yet. This didn't stop the Irish population in general from skulking around rainbows, hoping to win the supernatural lottery.

  Eoin Colfer

  Crazy, Taken, Winning

  Eoin Colfer (2001). “Artemis Fowl”

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• A city like Bombay, like New York, that is a recent creation on the planet and does not have a substantial indigenous population, is full of restless people. Those who have come here have not been at ease somewhere else. And unlike others who may have been equally uncomfortable wherever they came from, these people got up and moved. As I have discovered, having once moved, it is difficult to stop moving.

  Suketu Mehta

  New York, Moving, Somewhere Else

  Suketu Mehta (2006). “Maximum city: Bombay lost and found”, p.34, Penguin Books India

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• When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.

  Neil Postman

  Baby, People, Risk

  Neil Postman (2005). “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”, p.129, Penguin

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• Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.

  John Irving

  People, Majority, Mets

  John Irving (2012). “A Widow For One Year”, p.271, Random House

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• The reason this system can’t be overthrown in this country,” Walter said, “is all about freedom. The reason the free market in Europe is tempered by socialism is that they’re not so hung up on personal liberties there. They also have lower population growth rates, despite comparable income levels. The Europans are all-around more rational, basically. And the conversation about rights in this country isn’t rational. It’s taking place on the level of emotion, and class resentments, which is why the right is so good at exploiting it.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Country, Rights, Europe

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• Our scientific advances will be merely obscene unless they help the large part of our world's population emerge from miserable uncertainty and debilitating terror.

  Michael Moorcock

  Our World, Helping, Miserable

  Michael Moorcock, Allan Kausch, Iain Sinclair (2012). “London Peculiar and Other Nonfiction”, p.1, PM Press

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• Southern girls are God's gift to the entire male population. There is absolutely no woman finer than one raised below the mason-dixon line and once you go southern may the good Lord help you - you never go back

  Kenny Chesney

  Girl, Country, Southern

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• ...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

  Worst Enemy, Growth, Excess

  Pentti Linkola (2011). “Can Life Prevail?”, p.122, Arktos

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• Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population dangerously concentrated in cities and factories, whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion, be taught that all is right as it is.

  Howard Zinn

  Law, Cities, Taught

  Howard Zinn (2014). “A People's History of the United States”, p.233, Pan Macmillan

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• The Colonel's hand was so little, and I grabbed it tight, his cold seeping into me and my warmth into him. 'I memorized the populations,' he said.

  John Green

  Hands, Littles, Cold

  John Green (2008). “Looking for Alaska”, p.112, Penguin

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• She gave Pretty Boy a surreptitious glance. Did he honestly expect her to believe he was gay? True, there were the gay boots and those stunning good looks. But, even so, he blasted enough heterosexual mega-wattage to light up the entire female population. Which he’d undoubtedly been doing since he shot out of the birth canal, glimpsed his reflection in the obstetrician’s eyeglasses, and gave the world a high five.

  Susan Elizabeth Phillips

  Believe, Gay, Reflection

  Susan Elizabeth Phillips (2009). “Natural Born Charmer”, p.20, Harper Collins

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• If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Daughter, Equality, Class

  Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.10, Routledge

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• The marriage institution cannot exist among slaves, and one sixth of the population of democratic America is denied it's privileges by the law of the land. What is to be thought of a nation boasting of its liberty, boasting of it's humanity, boasting of its Christianity, boasting of its love of justice and purity, and yet having within its own borders three millions of persons denied by law the right of marriage?

  Frederick Douglass

  Love, America, Law

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• In the new American ghetto, the nightmare engine is bubble economics, a kind of high-tech casino scam that kills neighborhoods just like dope does, only the product is credit, not crack or heroin. It concentrates the money of the population in just a few hands with brutal efficiency, just like narco-business, and just as in narco-business the product itself, debt, steadily demoralizes the customer to the point where he’s unable to prevent himself from being continually dominated.

  Matt Taibbi

  Ghetto, Dope, Hands

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• The Doctor: The Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. And there it is: planet Earth at its height. Covered with megacities, five moons, population 96 billion. The hub of a galactic domain, stretching across a million planets, a million species. With mankind right in the middle. [Adam faints] The Doctor: [leans towards Rose, still looking out over the Earth] He's your boyfriend.

  Russell T Davies

  Moon, Doctors, Rose

  "Doctor Who: The Long Game". TV Series, May 7, 2005.

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• If people only made prudent marriages, what a stop to population there would be!

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  People, Would Be, Prudent

  William Makepeace Thackeray (2015). “Vanity Fair”, p.224, BookRix

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• I don't think whole populations are villainous, but Americans are just extraordinarily unaware of all kinds of things. If you live in the middle of that vast continent, with apparently everything your heart could wish for just because you were born there, then why worry? [...] If people lose knowledge, sympathy and understanding of the natural world, they're going to mistreat it and will not ask their politicians to care for it.

  David Attenborough

  Heart, Thinking, People

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• People often ask, "What is the single most important environmental population problem facing the world today?" A flip answer would be, "The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!

  Jared Diamond

  Population Problem, People, Focus

  Jared Diamond (2011). “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition”, p.457, Penguin

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