Garrett Hardin Quotes

39 Sourced Quotes

What features of your daily life do you expect to be improved by a further increase in population?

Garrett Hardin
Never globalize a problem if it can possibly be dealt with locally.

Garrett Hardin
The social arrangements that produce responsibility are arrangements that create coercion, of some sort.

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

Garrett Hardin
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... 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? The truth or falsity of evolution is a secondary matter. Rationalists must listen to the complaints of the Fundamentalists with a psychiatrist's "third ear", and respond to the more subtle messages.

Garrett Hardin
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
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
In a finite world this means that the per capita share of the world's goods must steadily decrease.

Garrett Hardin
Many of the environmentalists who moved into the environmental movement after Silent Spring... detested pollution and craved purity. Absolute purity. They wanted to enforce zero tolerance on all environmental pollutants, not just on carcinogens. With friends like these the environment needs no enemies.

Garrett Hardin