Populations Of Us Quotes & Sayings

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

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

In essence, terrorism is a show. Terrorists stage a terrifying spectacle of violence that captures our imagination and makes us feel as if we are sliding back into medieval chaos. Consequently states often feel obliged to react to the theatre of terrorism with a show of security, orchestrating immense displays of force, such as the persecution of entire populations or the invasion of foreign countries. In most cases, this overreaction to terrorism poses a far greater threat to our security than the terrorists themselves. Terrorists — Yuval Noah Harari

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

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

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

Without ever leaving her hide-out in Milledgeville, Georgia, Flannery O'Connor knew all there was to know about the two-lane, dirt and blacktop Southern roads of the 1950s - with their junkyards and tourist courts, gravel pits and pine trees that pressed at the edges of the road. She knew the slogans of the Burma Shave signs, knew the names of barbecue joints and the chicken baskets on their menus. She also knew a backwoods American cadence and vocabulary you'd think was limited to cops, truckers, runaway teens, and patrons of the Teardrop Inn where at midnight somebody could always be counted on to go out to a pickup truck and come back with a shotgun. She was a virtuoso mimic, and she assimilated whole populations of American sounds and voices, and then offered them back to us from time to time in her small fictional detonations, one of which she named, in 1953, "A Good Man Is Hard To Find. — William Caverlee

The commercialism of yoga, the commercialism of Ayurveda, the commercialism of guru-ism, is difficult. It's difficult because it confuses, it confuses the general populations as to what this is all about, but yet those of us who are trained within a certain tradition, who trained from the ancestral gene bank, so to speak, it is fine, it's not bothersome at all because we must live. — Maya Tiwari

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When you think about the scale of human populations all over the world and the fact that there's so much here, really, the only way to be able to visualize that is to pull back in space ... It allows us to see hidden temples and tombs and pyramids and even entire settlements. — Sarah Parcak

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

Boy, there are people who conquered half the world, slaughtered whole populations, wiped cultures off the face of the planet, and you know what history calls them? Heroes! Kings, presidents, champions, explorers. You think America was settled by white men because the Indians invited us her? No, we took this land because we were stronger, and that's how every page of human history is written. It's just our nature. We're a predator species, top of the food chain. Survival of the fittest is written in our blood, it's stenciled on every gene of our DNA. The strong take and the strong make, and the weak are there only to help them do it. End of story. — Jonathan Maberry

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

Early accounts of the abundance of fish and wildlife offer us a window to the past that helps reveal the magnitude of subsequent declines. They provide us with benchmarks against which we can compare the condition of today's seas. Such benchmarks are valuable in countering the phenomenon of shifting environmental baselines, whereby each generation comes to view the environment into which it was born as natural, or normal. Shifting environmental baselines cause a collective societal amnesia in which gradual deterioration of the environment and depletion of wildlife populations pass almost unnoticed. Our expectations diminish with time, and with them goes our will to do something about the losses. — Callum Roberts

Scientific illiteracy in our populations is leaving too many of us unprepared to discuss or understand much of the damage we are wreaking on our atmosphere, our habitat, and even the food that enters our mouths. — Barbara Kingsolver

Even if we act immediately, the world is doomed to lose many of its animal and plant species and this inturn will reduce the ability of ecosystems to deliver vital services to human populations. The Red List gives all of us a practical tool for raising awareness of the biodiversity crisis and for forging new partnerships within the international community. — Achim Steiner

The moment we face it frankly we are driven to the conclusion that the community has a right to put a price on the right to live in it ... If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way. Is it any wonder that some of us are driven to prescribe the lethal chamber as the solution for the hard cases which are at present made the excuse for dragging all the other cases down to their level, and the only solution that will create a sense of full social responsibility in modern populations? — George Bernard Shaw

No empire or force for "good" has ever successfully eliminated a population of "evildoers." The populations we claim to have vanquished are still with us today and contributing to our society in ways that are usually unacknowledged. Perhaps the real "hell" of war is that you can never really win one. — Greg Graffin

It is true that dispossession carries this double valence and that as a result it is difficult to understand until we see that we value it in one of its modalities and abhor and resist it in another. As you say, dispossession can be a term that marks the limits of self-sufficiency and that establishes us as relational and interdependent beings. Yet dispossession is precisely what happens when populations lose their land, their citizenship, their means of livelihood, and become subject to military and legal violence. We oppose this latter form of dispossession because it is both forcible and privative. — Judith Butler

Society and medicine treat us all as members of populations, whereas as individuals we are all unique, and population statistics do not apply. — Craig Venter

We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion. We need to eliminate nationalism and tribalism and become Earthlings. And as Earthlings, we need to recognize that all the other species that live on this planet are also fellow citizens and also Earthlings. This is a planet of incredible diversity of life-forms; it is not a planet of one species as many of us believe. — Paul Watson

There are those who are trying hard to do something about these threats, and others who are acting to escalate them. If you, this future historian or extraterrestrial observer, looked at who is in each group, you would see something strange indeed: those trying to mitigate or overcome these threats are the least developed societies - the indigenous populations, or the remnants of them; tribal societies; and first nations in Canada. They're not talking about nuclear war but environmental disaster, and they're really trying to do something about it. — Noam Chomsky

The people of that age were phrase slaves. The abjectness of their servitude is incomprehensible to us. There was a magic in words greater than the conjurer's art. So befuddled and chaotic were their minds that the utterance of a single word could negative the generalizations of a lifetime of serious research and thought. Such a word was the adjective UTOPIAN. The mere utterance of it could damn any scheme, no matter how sanely conceived, of economic amelioration or regeneration. Vast populations grew frenzied over such phrases as "an honest dollar" and "a full dinner pail." The coinage of such phrases was considered strokes of genius. — Jack London

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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