Garrett Hardin Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“You cannot do only one thing.”
-- Garrett Hardin -
“No one should be able to enter a wilderness by mechanical means.”
-- Garrett Hardin -
“Society does not need more children; but it does need more loved children. Quite literally, we cannot afford unloved children - but we pay heavily for them every day. There should not be the slightest communal concern when a woman elects to destroy the life of her thousandth-of-an-ounce embryo. But all society should rise up in alarm when it hears that a baby that is not wanted is about to be born.”
-- Garrett Hardin -
“A finite world can support only a finite population; therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero.”
-- 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 -
“The exquisite sight, sound, and smell of wilderness is many times more powerful if it is earned through physical achievement, if it comes at the end of a long and fatiguing trip for which vigorous good health is necessary. Practically speaking, this means that no one should be able to enter a wilderness by mechanical means.”
-- Garrett Hardin -
“Throughout history, human exploitation of the earth has produced this progression: colonize-destroy-move on.”
-- Garrett Hardin -
“Ecological differentiation is the necessary condition for coexistence.”
-- Garrett Hardin -
“Moreover, the practical recommendations deduced from ecological principles threaten the vested interests of commerce; it is hardly surprising that the financial and political power created by these investments should be used sometimes to suppress environmental impact studies.”
-- Garrett Hardin -
“But as population became denser, the natural chemical and biological recycling processes became overloaded, calling for a redefinition of property rights.”
-- Garrett Hardin -
“Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed.”
-- Garrett Hardin -
“However, I think the major opposition to ecology has deeper roots than mere economics; ecology threatens widely held values so fundamental that they must be called religious.”
-- Garrett Hardin -
“Using the commons as a cesspool does not harm the general public under frontier conditions, because there is no public, the same behavior in a metropolis is unbearable.”
-- Garrett Hardin -
“People are the quintessential element in all technology... Once we recognize the inescapable human nexus of all technology our attitude toward the reliability problem is fundamentally changed.”
-- Garrett Hardin -
“The god who is reputed to have created fleas to keep dogs from moping over their situation must also have created fundamentalists to keep rationalists from getting flabby. Let us be duly thankful for out blessings.”
-- Garrett Hardin -
“In a competitive world of limited resources, total freedom of individual action is intolerable”
-- Garrett Hardin -
“In an approximate way, the logic of commons has been understood for a long time, perhaps since the discovery of agriculture or the invention of private property in real estate.”
-- Garrett Hardin -
“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?”
-- 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.”
-- Garrett Hardin -
“An attack on values is inevitably seen as an act of subversion.”
-- Garrett Hardin -
“Continuity is at the heart of conservatism: ecology serves that heart.”
-- Garrett Hardin -
“Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution.”
-- Garrett Hardin -
“Why are ecologists and environmentalists so feared and hated? This is because in part what they have to say is new to the general public, and the new is always alarming.”
-- Garrett Hardin -
“In a finite world this means that the per capita share of the world's goods must steadily decrease.”
-- Garrett Hardin -
“Incommensurables cannot be compared.”
-- Garrett Hardin -
“Of course, a positive growth rate might be taken as evidence that a population is below its optimum.”
-- Garrett Hardin -
“Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.”
-- Garrett Hardin -
“A technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality.”
-- 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 -
“The social arrangements that produce responsibility are arrangements that create coercion, of some sort.”
-- Garrett Hardin
