Overpopulation - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

The council refused to accept, even in principle, any form of population control. By now we're stifling under the pressure of our own numbers, we're crushed shapeless under it. Everything has had to give way to our one basic problem, how to feed an ever-increasing number of hungry mouths. Morality has dwindled into feeding ourselves.

- Margaret St. Clair, ''Brightness Falls from the Air'' (1951)

There are too many of us, he thought. There are billions of us and that's too many. Nobody knows anyone. Strangers come and violate you. Strangers come and cut your heart out. Strangers come and take your blood.

- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1954)

Some troubledome just figured out that if you allow for every codder and shiggy and appleofmyeye a space one foot by two you could stand us all on the six hundred forty square mile surface of the island of Zanzibar.

- John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

population explosion Unique in human experience, an event which happened yesterday but which everyone swears won't happen until tomorrow.

- John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

It isn't the threat of war, or crime in the streets, or corruption in high places, or pesticides, or smog, or ''education'' that doesn't teach; those things are just symptoms of the underlying cancer. It's too many people. Not too many souls, or honks, or thirds - just . . . too many. Seven billion people sitting in each other's laps, trying to take in each other's washing, pick each other's pockets.

- Robert A. Heinlein, I Will Fear No Evil (1970)

The special madness that man has invented: The ultimate predator, he removes all constraints on his own reproductivity and now he breeds to the point where he has to prey upon himself.

- Thomas N. Scortia, ''Judas Fish'' (1971)

The earth was sick, blotched by hungry and desperate people from pole to shining pole. There had never been an uglier joke than pinning man's future on birth control.

- Chad Oliver, ''King of the Hill'' (1972)

My world, my Earth, is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species.We multiplied and gobbled and fought until there was nothing left, and then we died.We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt.We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974)

You humans spread like a disease.

- Barry B. Longyear, ''Enemy Mine'' (1979)

The Four Horsemen were good at population control.

- Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (1992)