States By Population Quotes & Sayings

And foe-of-convenience, the United States, barely the hope of the world, guilty of torture, helpless before its sacred text conceived in an age of powdered wigs, a constitution as unchallengeable as the Koran. Its nervous population obese, fearful, tormented by inarticulate anger, contemptuous of governance, murdering sleep with every new handgun. Africa — Ian McEwan

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

I know that in the United States we consume between 25 and 30 percent of the world's resources, whereas we comprise less than 5 percent of the world's population. That type of injustice has to be backed up by brute force. — Beatrice Ekwa Ekoko

One of the least meaningful and most overused words in the English language is 'sustainability.' For most Americans, it means something like 'pretty much the way I live right now, though maybe with a different car.' A good test of any activity or product described as sustainable is to multiply it by 300 million (the approximate current population of the United States) and then by 9 or 10 billion (the expected population of the world by midcentury) and see if it still seems green. This is not an easy test to pass — David Owen

Whatever the reason for enlisting, by 1865 the Union had sworn in 2,128,948 men, approximately one-third of the military-age male population of the northern states, while the Confederacy probably enrolled a little under 1 million men, about four-fifths of its military-age male population. — Allen C. Guelzo

The United States is dangerously close to being a plutocracy. A third of the private wealth is owned by less than 5 percent of the population. — Robert Payne

Jewish immigration in the 20th century was fueled by the Holocaust, which destroyed most of the European Jewish community. The migration made the United States the home of the largest Jewish population in the world. — Jon Porter

There are two ways that you can gain territory from another group. One is by conquest. That's essentially the way we took California from Mexico and ... Texas as well. But what's going on now may end up being a kind of recolonization of the Southwest, because the other way you can regain territory is by population infiltration and demographic dominance ... The United States will be faced with the problem that Canada has been faced with ... and which our system is not prepared to accommodate. — Eugene McCarthy

It has been estimated that of the world Jew population of approximately fifteen millions, no fewer than five million are in the United States. Twenty-five percent of the inhabitants of New York are Jews. During the Great War we bought off this huge American Jewish public by the promise of the Jewish National Home in Palestine, held by Ludendorff to be the master stroke of Allied propaganda as it enabled us not only to appeal to Jews in America but to Jews in Germany as well. — Sidney Robertson Cowell

The area occupied by the Christians in Syria and Palestine, called Outremer because of its location beyond the Mediterranean Sea, was a thin coastal strip extending from Armenia in the north to the borders of the Fatimid caliphate of Egypt in the south. By 1109, the Christian territory was divided into four large states: the Kingdom of Jerusalem, extending from Gaza to Beirut; the County of Tripoli, from Beirut to Margat; the Principality of Antioch, from Margat to Alexandria; and the County of Edessa, which stretched northeast all the way to present-day Urfa. These Latin states were governed by noble courts in much the same way as their counterparts in Europe. They were often rocked by dynastic disputes, which, together with the scarcity of available troops and the latent threat of Muslim attack, put the security of the Christian population in a constant state of uncertainty. — Barbara Frale

Look, Neal, Hawaii is not some magical pixie wonderland; it's an American state populated by atomic weapons, a remnant native population and people too stupid to spell their way out of a paper bag. Most of them came here to escape pathetic lives in the forty nine other states, so in some sense, Hawaii is a scenic cul-de-sac filled with people who want to drink themselves to death without feeling judged. — Douglas Coupland

Equally worrying, and far less recognized, medicine has been slow to confront the very changes that it has been responsible for - or to apply the knowledge we have about how to make old age better. Although the elderly population is growing rapidly, the number of certified geriatricians the medical profession has put in practice has actually fallen in the United States by 25 percent between 1996 and 2010. Applications to training programs in adult primary care medicine have plummeted, while fields like plastic surgery and radiology receive applications in record numbers. Partly, this has to do with money - incomes in geriatrics and adult primary care are among the lowest in medicine. And partly, whether we admit it or not, a lot of doctors don't like taking care of the elderly. — Atul Gawande

Many developing countries continue to be burdened by high percentages of their population living in poverty. Yet, instead of addressing this root cause of conflict, many states, ironically, increase their military might in order to control increasingly desperate populations. — Oscar Arias

Most people imagine that the explosion in the U.S. prison population during the past twenty-five years reflects changes in crime rates. Few would guess that our prison population leaped from approximately 350,000 to 2.3 million in such a short period of time due to changes in laws and policies, not changes in crime rates. Yet it has been changes in our laws - particularly the dramatic increases in the length of our prison sentences - that have been responsible for the growth of our prison system, not increases in crime. One study suggests that the entire increase in the prison population from 1980 to 2001 can be explained by sentencing policy changes. — Michelle Alexander

Facebook has more than 1 billion members, which by population makes it the third largest country in the world - somewhere between India and the United States. Who's sending missionaries to that country? Who's planting churches there? — Phil Cooke

One of the first signs of a repressive regime is the capture of the education systems of their respective countries. Whether the theocrats have taken over by force or by subterfuge (as is being attempted in the United States), they dumb down learning, crush knowledge, and then supplant it with their dogma. They then gain secure political power because the population isn't educated enough to critically examine what is really going on. — Jeffrey Selman

California and Italy are about the same size. Roughly speaking, California contains about 150,000 square miles, Italy about 120,000 square miles. They are not dissimilar in physical characteristics. They extend over a long distance from north to south, and each has an extensive coastline. Each is destitute of coal mines. Each produces large quantities of wheat. Each produces citrus and other fruits, olives, wine, and raisins. The climate is about the same, although California's is superior. They are in about the same zone. Rome lies in about the same latitude as San Francisco. Our state is one of the richest and most fertile of all the United States. Yet suppose that California were as populous as Italy - someday it will be. Suppose it had a population of millions. Could California, even with its vast resources, support an army of a quarter of a million men as Italy does? She could do it only as Italy does, by grinding the people into the dust with oppressive taxation. — Jerome Hart

When the United States of America, which was meant to be a Utopia for all, was less than a century old, Noah Rosewater and a few men like him demonstrated the folly of the Founding Fathers in one respect: those sadly recent ancestors had not made it the law of the Utopia that the wealth of each citizen should be limited. This oversight was engendered by a weak-kneed sympathy for those who loved expensive things, and by the feeling that the continent was so vast and valuable, and the population so thin and enterprising, that no thief, no matter how fast he stole, could more than mildly inconvenience anyone. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Half the U.S. population owns barely 2 percent of its wealth, putting the United States near Rwanda and Uganda and below such nations as pre-Arab Spring Tunisia and Egypt when measured by degrees of income inequality. — Eric Alterman

Democracy, in the United States rhetoric refers to a system of governance in which elite elements based in the business community control the state by virtue of their dominance of the private society, while the population observes quietly. So understood, democracy is a system of elite decision and public ratification, as in the United States itself. Correspondingly, popular involvement in the formation of public policy is considered a serious threat. It is not a step towards democracy; rather it constitutes a 'crisis of democracy' that must be overcome. — Noam Chomsky

Gates put it to me this way: "For good stuff to happen, it requires a lot of things to go well - you need many pieces to get stability right." None of it is going to happen overnight, but we need to work with the forces of order that do still exist in the World of Disorder to start building a different trajectory, beginning with all the basics: basic education, basic infrastructure - roads, ports, electricity, telecom, mobile banking - basic agriculture, and basic governance. The goal, said Gates, is to get these frail states to a level of stability where enough women and girls are getting educated and empowered for population growth to stabilize, where farmers can feed their families, and where you "start to get a reverse brain drain" as young people feel that they have a chance to connect to and contribute and benefit from today's global flows by staying at home and not emigrating. Believe — Thomas L. Friedman

There is perhaps some hope to be derived from the fact that in most instances where an attempt to realize an ideal society gave birth to the ugliness and violence of a prolonged active mass movement the experiment was made on a vast scale and with a heterogeneous population. Such was the case in the rise of Christianity and Islam, and in the French, Russian and Nazi revolutions. The promising communal settlements in the small state of Israel and the successful programs of socialization in the small Scandinavian states indicate perhaps that when the attempt to realize an ideal society is undertaken by a small nation with a more or less homogeneous population it can proceed and succeed in an atmosphere which is neither hectic nor coercive. — Eric Hoffer

...Americans didn't stick to cities, which makes us different from the people in other industrialized countries. We no sooner arrived in town, turning those towns into great mid-century metropolises, than we decided to take off for the green world beyond, so that by the 1970 Census, we had become the first suburban nation in the history of the world. And Detroit led the way, with a population curve up and down just like everywhere else, but with its urban decline a lot steeper over the past sixty years - so typical a place that it only looks like an exception. — Jerry Herron

Shortly before the outbreak of the Great War it was calculated that four per cent of the population of England held ninety per cent of all the wealth of the country. In the United States sixty percent of the wealth was held by two per cent of the people while at the other extreme of the social scale sixty-five per cent of the population representing the labor element, the main factor in the production of wealth, possessed no more than five per cent of the total riches of the land. — Joseph Casper Husslein

Slavery existed in the African states, and it was sometimes used by Europeans to justify their own slave trade. But, as Davidson points out, the "slaves" of Africa were more like the serfs of Europe - in other words, like most of the population of Europe. — Howard Zinn

My firm conviction is that if wide-spread Eugenic reforms are not adopted during the next hundred years or so, our Western Civilization is inevitably destined to such a slow and gradual decay as that which has been experienced in the past by every great ancient civilization. The size and the importance of the United States throws on you a special responsibility in your endeavours to safeguard the future of our race. Those who are attending your Congress will be aiding in this endeavour, and though you will gain no thanks from your own generation, posterity will, I believe, learn to realize the great dept it owes to all the workers in this field. — Leonard Darwin

Al Qaeda is using our liberal justice system," he continued. I really don't know what liberal justice system he was talking about: the U.S. broke the world record for the number of people it has in prison. Its prison population is over two million, more than any other country in the world, and its rehabilitation programs are a complete failure. The United States is the "democratic" country with the most draconian punishment system; in fact, it is a good example of how draconian punishments do not help in stopping crimes. Europe is by far more just and humane, and the rehab programs there work, so the crime rate in Europe is decisively lower than the U.S. But the American proverb has it, "When the going gets rough, the rough get going." Violence naturally produces violence; the only loan you can make with a guarantee of payback is violence. It might take some time, but you will always get your loan back. — Mohamedou Ould Slahi

We are 10 percent of the population of this nation and it would be foolish for me to stand up and tell you we are going to get our freedom by ourselves. There's going to have to be a coalition of conscience and we aren't going to be free here in Mississippi and anywhere in the United States until there is a committed empathy on the part of the white man of this country, and he comes to see along with us that segregation denigrates him as much as it does the Negro. — Martin Luther King Jr.

It is pleasing to reflect that results so beneficial, not only to the States immediately concerned, but to the harmony of the Union, will have been accomplished by measures equally advantageous to the Indians. What the native savages become when surrounded by a dense population and by mixing with the whites may be seen in the miserable remnants of a few Eastern tribes, deprived of political and civil rights, forbidden to make contracts, and subjected to guardians, dragging out a wretched existence, without excitement, without hope, and almost without thought. — Andrew Jackson

The longer the long war gets, the harder it will be, because it's a race against time, against lengthening demographic, economic, and geopolitical odds. By "demographic," I mean the Muslim world's high birth rate, which by mid-century will give tiny Yemen a higher population than vast empty Russia. By "economic," I mean the perfect storm the Europeans will face within this decade, because their lavish welfare states are unsustainable with their post-Christian birth rates. By "geopolitical," I mean that if you think the United Nations and other international organizations are antipathetic to America now, wait a few years and see what kind of support you get from a semi-Islamified Europe. — Anonymous

Countries with high levels of atheism are also the most charitable both in terms of the percentage of their wealth they devote to social welfare programs and the percentage they give in aid to the developing world. The dubious link between Christian literalism and Christian values is belied by other indices of social equality. Consider the ratio of salaries paid to top-tier CEOs and those paid to the same firms' average employees: in Britain it is 24:1; in France, 15:1; in Sweden, 13:1; in the United States, where 80 percent of the population expects to be called before God on Judgment Day, it is 475:1. Many a camel, it would seem, expects to pass easily through the eye of a needle. — Sam Harris

For a great state, qua state, is not one which embraces a great population or an extensive territory, but one which achieves a great intensity of social unity. And in this matter we must bear in mind that unity means unity of purpose and will, and not merely unity of action and result. One of the most significant reasons for refusing to attribute an unlimited degree of statehood to those associations which are legally known as states, is that their size is governed by considerations of commerce, mere whim, or by other limited ends, rather than by reference to the good life or the excellence of souls. — Michael Oakeshott

For many people, that war [WWII] is called the "good war" because it was fought against a regime guilty of unspeakable atrocities. But the Allies did not enter the war to save Jews from extermination. The United States entered the war after it was attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor and, as a nation, we certainly did not do as much as we should have to save the Jewish population of Europe. The basic question is still with us: Is it right, justifiable, to intervene in a nation's internal activities when those activities include genocide, ethnic cleansing, or some other demonstrable harm to a subset of its people? — Nel Noddings

One of the great strengths of the United States is ... we have a very large Christian population - we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values. — Barack Obama

In 1989, Eugene Peniston and Paul Kulkosky used a specific neurofeedback protocol for the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). They facilitated twilight states of learning by rewarding both alpha and theta. Their protocol has come to be called deep-states training (Robbins, 2000a). Guided visualizations and skin temperature (ST) training were also part of the protocol design. The first landmark study included a small population of Vietnam veterans. Two years later Peniston and Kulkosky studied the effect of neurofeedback training with veterans who had dual diagnoses of alcoholism and PTSD. Both studies had positive outcomes (Peniston & Kulkosky, 1999). They — John N. Demos