Populations Quotes & Sayings

I think that my main criticism in that book was directed at the general assumption that adaptation characterizes populations and species, rather than simply the individuals in the populations and species. — George C. Williams

Vast tracts of ocean, whether Polynesia, Micronesia or Melanesia, contain island populations that remain outside the modern world. They know about it, they may have traveled to it, they appreciate artifacts and medical help from it, but they live their daily lives much as hundreds of generations of ancestors before them, without money, electricity, phones, TV or manufactured food. — Andrew Rayner

Middle East and Africa is a product of failed states unable to keep up with the age of accelerations and enable their young people to realize their full potential. But these trends are exacerbated by climate change, population growth, and environmental degradation, which are undermining the agricultural foundations that sustain vast African and Middle Eastern populations on rural lands. The combination of failing states and failing agriculture is producing millions of young people, particularly young men, who have never held a job, never held power, and never held a girl's hand. That — Thomas L. Friedman

Technology tends toward avoidance of risks by investors. Uncertainty is ruled out if possible. People generally prefer the predictable. Few recognize how destructive this can be, how it imposes severe limits on variability and thus makes whole populations fatally vulnerable to the shocking ways our universe can throw the dice. — Frank Herbert

Traditionally, psychology has been the study of two populations: university freshmen and white rats. — Paul Bloom

When the West overpowered native populations, these actions, no matter how violent, were rationalized as manifestations of the natural order of things. "Manifest destiny" and "social Darwinism" laid the foundation for violent improvement of the world. Europeans saw themselves as superior and naturally born to rule. They believed that their domination of faraway lands brought "civilization" to the natives. In return, the rulers of the empires benefited. "The purpose of colonies was to supply the mother country with raw materials and to provide a market for her manufactured goods, — Eric Bogosian

It's always the same wherever one goes- it's not the most powerful rulers who have the happiest populations — Graham Greene

The nation will never drill, fill and extract its way out of what amounts to a public health crisis among some populations. Throwing more 'treaters' into the mix amounts to digging a hole in an ocean of disease. — Mary Otto

Today, Wilberforce University welcomes many of America's poorest and most underserved populations and transforms their educational dreams into realities. — Eric Metaxas

The sixteen hundred dairies in California's Central Valley alone produce more waste than a city of twenty-one million people-that's more than the populations of London, New York, and Chicago combined. — Gene Baur

Half of NYC's homeless populations are families.Homeless people have been ignored for too long. I'll just say this: If you are a family on the brink of eviction you are 80% less likely to get evicted if you have legal counsel. However, there is no right to legal counsel in housing court.It would cost the city $12,500 to grant that family legal counsel. Meanwhile, the average stay for a homeless family in a shelter once they have been evicted cost the city $45,000. So not only does it seem like the right thing to do morally, it's also the right thing to do fiscally. — Paul Bettany

We hear from time to time about horrible human rights atrocities happening around the globe. Our government claims that it stands in favor of human rights, and our leaders are in the news demanding consequences for other countries that are abusing their populations. But there is a huge denial about how widespread and common these kinds of atrocities are in the United States, and that we are not nearly as different from other countries as we would like to believe we are. — Lundy Bancroft

Throughout the early and mid-1990s, the Clinton administration debated the merits of paying for AIDS testing and counseling of vulnerable populations overseas. — Barton Gellman

The love of God is one of the great realities of the universe, a pillar upon which the hope of the world rests. But it is a personal, intimate thing too. God does not love populations, He loves people. He loves not masses, but men. — Aiden Wilson Tozer

This much is true: When we created the euro, it wasn't possible to create a political union along with it. People weren't ready for that. But since then, they've grown more willing to go in that direction. It's a process, one that is sometimes laborious and sometimes slow. But it's important to keep the populations involved. — Wolfgang Schauble

Pharmacogenomics holds great promise to shed scientific light on the often risky and costly process of drug development, and to provide greater confidence about the risks and benefits of drugs in specific populations. Pharmacogenomics is a new field, but we intend to do all we can to use it to promote the development of medicines. By providing practical guidance on how to turn the explosion of pharmacogenomic information into real evidence on new drugs, we are taking an important step toward that goal. — Mark McClellan

Part of Sykes's motive was rooted in religiosity. A devout Catholic, he regarded a return of the ancient tribe of Israel to the Holy Land as a way to correct
a nearly two-thousand-year-old wrong. That view had taken on new passion and
urgency with the massacres of the Armenians. To Sykes, in that ongoing atrocity, the Ottoman Empire had proven it could never again be trusted to protect
its religious minority populations. At war's end, the Christian and Jewish Holy
Land of Palestine would be taken from it, and the failure of the Crusades made
right. — Scott Anderson

Vast areas are witness to the struggles of destitute populations trying to survive under unlivable conditions. — Christian De Duve

This is how to control entire populations - don't suppress news, but make it so dumb and dull that nobody has any interest in it. — David Mitchell

I think markets are mechanisms that determine prices that are necessary for mass heterogenous populations, and markets do generate levels of technological innovation and productivity that is crucial. But when unregulated, they often generate levels of vast inequality and ugly isolation that makes it difficult for people to relate and connect with one another. — Cornel West

So ... I feel in regard to this aged England ... pressed upon by transitions of trade and ... competing populations,-I see her not dispirited, not weak, but well remembering that she has seen dark days before;-indeed, with a kind of instinct that she sees a little better in a cloudy day, and that, in storm of battle and calamity, she has a secret vigor and a pulse like a cannon. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Covenant of the League of Nations had envisaged sponsoring only the protection of certain categories of men: national minorities and populations of territories controlled by other countries. — Rene Cassin

As education becomes inclusive, introspective, cosmic, promoting whole populations to power and privilege, it enthrones a vast, invisible, personal rule over the common mind. — Amos Bronson Alcott

I am proud to represent New York's 13th Congressional District, which has one of the largest and diverse populations in the country. — Charles B. Rangel

If we can contain and monitor animal viruses at an earlier stage - when they're first entering human populations, preferably before they've had a chance to become human-adapted, certainly before they've had a chance to spread - we can head off pandemics altogether. — Nathan Wolfe

The right way to deal with healthcare reform is not to have a one-size-fits-all plan that's imposed on all the states, but recognizing the differences between different states' populations, states should be able to craft their own plans to get all their citizens insured, and to make sure that preexisting conditions are covered. — Mitt Romney

The growth of populations has in no way increased the amount [of art], it has merely increased
the adeptness with which substitutes can be produced and packaged. — Raymond Chandler

Massage therapy has been shown to relieve depression, especially in people who have chronic fatigue syndrome; other studies also suggest benefit for other populations. — Andrew Weil

To annihilate indigenous populations eventually paves the way to our own annihilation. They are the only people who practice sustainable living. We think they are relics of the past, but they may be the gatekeepers to our future. — Arundhati Roy

This planet might be able to support perhaps as many as half a billion people who could live a sustainable life in relative comfort. Human populations must be greatly diminished, and as quickly as possible to limit further environmental damage. — Eric Pianka

One of the issues facing us today is that there are countries where there is a serious lack of resources, the standards of living are very low, and this creates a fundamental unease and discomfort in entire populations. — Ralph Merkle

If you don't want to have gay weddings in Mormon churches, that's fine. That's absolutely up to the members of the faith or the leadership of the faith. I would never suggest that the Mormon Church has to consecrate gay unions. But homosexuality runs at a fairly constant rate through all populations. There are many gay Mormons. — Andrew Solomon

AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them. — Susan Sontag

The international community has to overcome its differences and find solutions to the conflicts of today in South Sudan, Syria, Central African Republic and elsewhere. Non-traditional donors need to step up alongside traditional donors. As many people are forcibly displaced today as the entire populations of medium-to-large countries such as Colombia or Spain, South Africa or South Korea, — Antonio Guterres

A less well known impact of immigrant populations is the increase that destination states gain in Congress where apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives is calculated on the basis of a state's entire adult population regardless of legal status. And, because each state's electoral college vote is the sum of the number of its representatives in the House and its two senators, high immigration states play a larger role in presidential elections than they might if only adult citizens and legal aliens were counted in population surveys. — Edward S. Greenberg

Frankly, I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of. — Ruth Bader Ginsburg

The ideal of self-advancement which the civilizing west offers to backward populations brings with it the plague of individual frustration. All the advantages brought by the West are ineffectual substitutes for the sheltering and soothing anonymity of communal existence. — Eric Hoffer

Armed with the new right to sell their products back to host societies, they can bleed both producing and buying populations at the same time. That is why under new international "free trade" agreements private corporations and businesses have increasingly demanded that governments deregulate and lower taxes so that they are not obliged to pay the cost of sustaining the life of host-societies or their environments. — John McMurtry

The fact of English supremacy is something most native speakers of English unknowingly suppress, all the while enjoying the privileges that come with it. Many non-English-speaking populations, however, cannot afford to suppress that fact but are forced to face it in one way or another, though their writers generally turn their backs on the linguistic asymmetry lest they end up too discouraged to write, overwhelmed by the unfairness of it all. — Juliet Winters Carpenter

But no city-state ever solved the problem of incorporating new territories and new populations into its existing structure, or involving really large numbers of people in its political life (p. 11) — Joseph Reese Strayer

Discrimination and multiple deprivations of human rights are also frequently part of the problem, sentencing entire populations to poverty ... It is surely a matter of outrage that over half a million women die annually from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth. This is nearly half the annual global death toll, and arguably, a direct reflection of the disempowerment of women in social, economic and political life. — Navi Pillay

What would happen if all the populations on the planet simply refused to fight human beings they did not even know? — Gladys Taber

Education, which was at first made universal in order that all might be able to read and write, has been found capable of serving quite other purposes. By instilling nonsense it unifies populations and generates collective enthusiasm. — Bertrand Russell

The three major mother gods of the Eastern populations seemed to be generating and destroying entities at the same time; both goddesses of life and fertility as well as goddesses of death. — Sigmund Freud

The war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organization of production, it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world. — Bertrand Russell

Military inclusion has never been a central demand from trans populations, who consistently name criminalization, immigration enforcement, poverty and joblessness as top priorities. — Dean Spade

But I stand convinced that the brand of justice in which we dealt, wholesale bombings of civilian populations, was blasphemous. — Kurt Vonnegut

Without equity, pandemic battles will fail. Viruses will simply recirculate, and perhaps undergo mutations or changes that render vaccines useless, passing through the unprotected populations of the planet. — Laurie Garrett

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we'll look back at the first decade of the 21st century when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we'd crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once? — Thomas Friedman

They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like a pain of an amputated leg no longer there. — Graham Greene

The major novelty of my theory was its claim that the most rapid evolutionary change does not occur in widespread, populous species, as claimed by Most geneticists, but in small founder populations. — Ernst Mayr

Well, one thing's very clear, that terrorism isn't just a threat which is external to Western countries. It's not simply a foreign menace that comes from overseas to strike our cities. It can and it does, as we now know, come from within our own countries and from inside our own populations. — Pauline Neville-Jones

You can stop splitting the atom; you can stop visiting the moon; you can stop using aerosols; you may even decide not to kill entire populations by the use of a few bombs. But you cannot recall a new form of life. — Erwin Chargaff

Striking a balance between wildlife conservation and wind energy development starts with understanding threats to eagle populations and how our actions, including operating wind farms, are affecting them. — Frances Beinecke

But unless Western populations can rise to the level of Egyptians they're going to remain victims. — Noam Chomsky

Asian Homo erectus died without issue and does not enter our immediate ancestry (for we evolved from African populations); Neanderthal people were collateral cousins, perhaps already living in Europe while we emerged in Africa ... In other words, we are an improbable and fragile entity, fortunately successful after precarious beginnings as a small population in Africa, not the predictable end result of a global tendency. We are a thing, an item of history, not an embodiment of general principles. — Stephen Jay Gould

Well than try giving it some thought, why don't you? Apply that finely tutored mind of yours to all those bullshit hero-with-a-high-destiny legends you people are so fucking fond of telling one another. You really think, in a mudball slaughterhouse of a world like this, where war and privation harden whole populations to inhuman brutality and ignorance, where the ruling classes dedicate their sons to learning the science of killing men the way they consign their daughters to breeding till they crack
you really think the gods of a world like that have got no better thing to do with their time than take some random piece of lowborn trash and spend long years carving him into shape for a cat's-paw? — Richard K. Morgan

It's as though not even that most basic level of imaginative thought had been admitted into consciousness to cause the slightest disturbance. A century of destruction unlike any other in its extremity befalls and blights the human race - scores of millions of ordinary people condemned to suffer deprivation upon deprivation, atrocity upon atrocity, evil upon evil, half the world or more subjected to pathological sadism as social policy, whole societies organized and fettered by the fear of violent persecution, the degradation of individual life engineered on a scale unknown throughout human history, nations broken and enslaved by ideological criminals who rob them of everything, entire populations so demoralized as to be unable to get out of bed in the morning with the minutest desire to face the day ... all the terrible touchstones presented by this century, and here they are up in arms about Faunia Farley. — Philip Roth

The senators know it's important to win statewide to have Hispanics and other immigrant populations supporting them. — Barack Obama

During the war, the holders of power in all countries found it necessary to bribe the populations into cooperation by unusual concessions. Wage-earners were allowed a living wage, Hindus were told they were men and brothers, women were given the vote, and young people were allowed to enjoy those innocent pleasures of which the old, in the name of morality, always wish to rob them. The war being won, the victors set to work to deprive their tools of advantages temporarily conceded. — Bertrand Russell

Heartless though it may seem to some, among the least harmful things to eat are sustainably culled wild animals. In the absence of natural predators, deer populations in parts of Britain have reached such dense numbers that the woodlands they browse fail to regenerate. — Tristram Stuart

The history of fossil-fuel development has always been that certain people are expendable. What's changed is that new, larger populations are now considered expendable. — Josh Fox

Human beings have become a virus to planet Earth. Our way of life consists of constant pollution of natural resources, violence between nations, oppression of populations, torturing of animals, and the destruction of our own health and wellness. Our society is not sustainable and the people in control have no interest in the well being of the people or the planet. — Joseph P. Kauffman

It's fashionable to speak about vulnerable populations in medicine and public policy, but it's harder to find a more vulnerable population than those who are dying. — Nicholas A. Christakis

The realization had brought with it a sudden stark insight into another kind of glamour. It was quite a long time ago now, but he saw it quite clearly: how the media and the advertisers had created their own kind of glamour to seduce whole populations into a kind of insanity. Food that was bad for people, drink that turned them into mindless thugs, countless tons of useless rubbish, all dressed up by advertising glamour to appear like things people couldn't live without. And the human race had fallen for it hook, line, and sinker, becoming....[c]onsumers of limitless glamour, all of it ultimately worthless. — Kate Thompson

After years of investigating aging populations, researchers' answer to the question of how much is not much. If all you do is walk several times a week, your brain will benefit. Even — John Medina

I descended to the ocean floor and encountered bloated, symmetrical creatures with pumping white hearts and translucent skin. Collapsed blue civilizations lived down there, fissured and antiseptic, craggy with barnacles and blistering rust. I reached into the heart of the earth, the sky, the moon. I colonized language, mathematics, schemes of chemical order and atomic weight. I studied the manufacture of automobiles, microcircuitry, Kleenex and planets. I memorized the gross national products of nations and hemispheres, the populations of cities and states and principalities, the achievements of presidents, tyrants and kings. I was trying to learn what I suspect Mom had learned already: that there were journeys we all make alone that take us far away from one another. — Scott Bradfield

People understand that nuclear weapons cannot be used without indiscriminate effects on civilian populations. Such weapons have no legitimate place in our world. Their elimination is both morally right and a practical necessity in protecting humanity. — Ban Ki-moon

Long before gun control was touted as 'common sense' measures, the concept was promoted as a means to keep ethnic populations in an unequal position while assuaging the fears of whites. — Niger Innis

Paleontological evidence suggests that the early farmers had more spinal issues, worse teeth, and more anemia and vitamin deficiencies - and died younger - than the populations of human foragers who preceded them. — Leonard Mlodinow

Then there was the gray of human habitation. The blue places were turning brown, the yellow places to dust, the green places to smoke and ashes. Each time one of the animals disappeared
they went by species or sometimes by organizations of species, interconnected
it was as though all mountains were gone, or all lakes. A certain form of the world. But in the gray that metastasized over continents and hemispheres few appeared to be deterred by this extinguishing or even to speak of it, no one outside fringe elements and elite groups, professors and hippies, small populations of little general importance. The quiet mass disappearance, the inversion of the Ark, was passing unnoticed. — Lydia Millet

Keller had a professor in college who said that civilization was a matter of plumbing. That basically, the infrastructure for moving clean water in and filthy water out is what allowed people to congregate in large populations in permanent dwellings and create cities and cultures. Otherwise, people had to be nomads to literally escape their own shit. — Don Winslow

The world of organisms, of animals and plants, is built up of individuals. I like to think, then, of natural history as the study of life at the level of the individual-of what plants and animals do, how they react to each other and their environment, how they are organized into larger groupings like populations and communities. — Marston Bates

One goal of the Clean Water Act of 1972 was to upgrade the nation's sewer systems, many of them built more than a century ago, to handle growing populations and increasing runoff of rainwater and waste. — Charles Duhigg

We need to create brand institutions. In the fortune 500 companies, 5 Indian companies are named while 15 are from China though we have similar kind of populations. — Abdul Kalam

Was revolution much more than one fast kick forward in the long process called evolution? We condemened the 'cost' of revolution; but was it higher than the cost over centuries in backward, underdeveloped communities, which still covered two-thirds of the earth and which still could not guarantee their populations daily bread? — Ella Winter

We needed to take a discrete population to give people the confidence that if we can end veterans' homelessness , we can attack chronic homelessness, families and other populations like foster youth, who each have distinct needs. — John Carlos Frey

If a vast majority of the population identify and embrace the nation's value system, then that nation is automatically great. Because they will live out these values in their daily life. — Sunday Adelaja

The crisis of democracy as when normally passive and apathetic populations become organized and seek to enter the political arena to pursue their interests and demands, threatening stability and order. — Noam Chomsky

The true miracle of modern medicine is diabolical. It consists in making not only individuals but whole populations survive on inhumanly low levels of personal health. — Ivan Illich

Why interesting and important? Because women are interesting and important in real life. They are not an afterthought of nature, they are not secondary players in human destiny, and every society has always known that. Without women capable of giving birth, human populations will die out. That is why the mass rape and murder of women, girls, and children has long been a feature of genocidal wars, and of other campaigns meant to subdue and exploit a population. — Margaret Atwood

Technology made large populations possible; large populations now make technology indispensable. — Joseph Wood Krutch

It seems that the Neanderthal DNA that modern Europeans and Asians (and also Native Americans and basically all non-African people) are carrying around is random. This means there are different bits and pieces in different populations, but it doesn't seem to amount to much that's significant. — Elizabeth Kolbert

In most of the affluent populations I have considered, the prevalence of coronary disease is associated with the consumption of sugar. Since sugar consumption is only one of a number of indices of wealth, the same sort of association (to coronary disease) exists with fat consumption, cigarette smoking, cars ... — John Yudkin

...but at night when he turns the awkward [telescope] skyward, he catches his breath at the clarity of the image and the vast populations of stars unknown to him until then, the riotous glittering in the dark crevices between constellations, a convocation of bright spirits waiting to be found. — John Pipkin

Ebola haunted Zaire because of corruption and political repression. The virus had no secret powers, nor was it unusually contagious. For centuries Ebola had lurked in the jungles of central Africa. Its emergence into human populations required the special assistance of humanity's greatest vices : greed, corruption, arrogance, tyranny, and callousness. — Laurie Garrett

There is a crucial difference between a one-state solution and a binational state. In general, nation-states have been imposed with substantial violence and repression for one reason - because they seek to force varied and complex populations into a single mold. — Noam Chomsky

If I could go back to a point in history to try to get things to come out differently, I would go back and tell moses to go up the mountain again and get the other tablet. Because the Ten Commandments just tell us what we are supped to do with one another, not a word about our relationship to the earth. Genesis starts with these commands: multiply, replenish the earth, and subdue it. We have multiplied very well, we have replenished our populations very well, we have subdued it all too well, and we don't have any other instruction. — David Brower

Most of the infections linked to human cancers are common in human populations; they are ubiquitous. They were present during the whole human evolution process. — Harald Zur Hausen

Obliteration bombing of civilian populations had come to be seen as a military necessity. A terrible evil had been defended as a way to a greater good. After the bomb, all sorts of moral compromises were easier - nearly two million abortions a year seemed a mere matter of freedom of choice, and the plight of the poor in the world's richest nation was a matter of economic necessity. — William H. Willimon

A hundred million crystallized polio viruses could cover the period at the end of this sentence. There could be two hundred and fifty Woodstock Festivals of viruses sitting on that period-the combined populations of Great Britain and France-and you would never know it. — Anonymous

Genetically speaking, individuals and groups are like clouds in the sky or dust- storms in the desert. They are temporary aggregations or federations. They are not stable through evolutionary time. Populations may last a long while, but they are constantly blending with other populations and so losing their identity. — Richard Dawkins

Quantitative work shows clearly that natural selection is a reality, and that, among other things, it selects Mendelian genes, which are known to be distributed at random through wild populations, and to follow the laws of chance in their distribution to offspring. In other words, they are an agency producing variation of the kind which Darwin postulated as the raw material on which selection acts. — John B. S. Haldane

During the first and primitive stages of the history of our species there was a general centrifugal movement of peoples into distance, to all sides, with the various populations becoming increasingly separated, each developing its own applications and associated interpretations of the shared universal motifs; whereas, since we are all now being brought together again in this mighty present period of world transport and communication, those differences are fading. The old differences separating one system from another now are becoming less and less important, less and less easy to define. And what, on the contrary, is becoming more and more important is that we should learn to see through all the differences to the common themes that have been there all the while, that came into being with the first emergence of ancestral man from the animal levels of existence, and are with us still. — Joseph Campbell

Wild animals almost never die of old age: starvation, disease, or predators catch up with them long before they become really senile. Until recently this was true of man too. Most animals die in childhood, many never get beyond the egg stage. Starvation and other causes of death are the ultimate reasons why populations cannot increase indefinitely. — Richard Dawkins

Peoples, populations, native populaces, tribes and religious communities are not nations, even though they are often spoken of as such. — Shlomo Sand

I'm not in sympathy with Communism except for populations which are in a state of peasantry, actually hungry and starving. The ideal state for me is some form of Socialism, which doesn't yet exist, as far as I know, which doesn't repress the arts, or any race. Consequently I'm not a political person ... except that I'm a revolutionary. — Tennessee Williams

The autocracy was legitimized by its ever-expanding multi-faith, multi-ethnic empire, yet the later emperors regarded themselves as the leaders first of the Russian nation but then of the entire Slavic community. The more they embraced Russian nationalism, the more they excluded (and often persecuted) their huge non-Russian populations, — Simon Sebag Montefiore

A beautiful literary collection that tells of today's country doctor, somewhat removed from our romantic black-bag image of days gone by, but still fulfilling an essential need in caring for spread-out populations. At times, with today's advances in technology, medicine in rural America looks very like it does in America's cities, but the variety of practices is enormous. The Country Doctor Revisited captures the trials and tribulations of medicine, but also the satisfaction and the extraordinary rewards that come to those who embrace such a practice. — Abraham Verghese

Insect resistance to a pesticide was first reported in 1947 for the Housefly (Musca domestica) with respect to DDT. Since then resistance to one or more pesticides has been reported in at least 225 species of insects and other arthropods. The genetic variants required for resistance to the most diverse kinds of pesticides were apparently present in every one of the populations exposed to these man-made compounds. — Francisco J. Ayala