Albert Bartlett Quotes & Sayings

Modern agriculture is the use of land to convert petroleum into food — Albert Allen Bartlett

Can you think of anything that can get better if we crowd more people into our cities, our towns, into our state our nation or on this earth? — Albert Allen Bartlett

Baseball is part of America's plot, part of America's mysterious, underlying design-the plot in which we all conspire and collude, the plot of the story of our national life. — Albert Allen Bartlett

The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. — Albert A. Bartlett

The first law of sustainability: population growth and/or growth in the rate of consumption of resources cannot be sustained — Albert Allen Bartlett

'Smart growth' destroys the environment. 'Dumb growth' destroys the environment. The only difference is that 'smart growth' does it with good taste. It's like booking passage on the Titanic. Whether you go first-class or steerage, the result is the same. — Albert Allen Bartlett

Can you think of any problem, in any area of human endeavour, on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases in population, locally, nationally, or globally? — Albert Allen Bartlett

We must realize that growth is but an adolescent phase of life which stops when physical maturity is reached. If growth continues in the period of maturity it is called obesity or cancer. Prescribing growth as the cure for the energy crisis has all the logic of prescribing increasing quantities of food as a remedy for obesity. — Albert A. Bartlett