A finite world can support only a finite population; therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero.
- Garrett Hardin Quote

An attack on values is inevitably seen as an act of subversion.
- Garrett Hardin Quote

Continuity is at the heart of conservatism: ecology serves that heart.
- Garrett Hardin Quote

Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed.
- Garrett Hardin Quote

Fundamentalists are panicked by the apparent disintegration of the family, the disappearance of certainty and the decay of morality. Fear leads them to ask, if we cannot trust the Bible, what can we trust?
- Garrett Hardin Quote

However, I think the major opposition to ecology has deeper roots than mere economics; ecology threatens widely held values so fundamental that they must be called religious.
- Garrett Hardin Quote

In an approximate way, the logic of commons has been understood for a long time, perhaps since the discovery of agriculture or the invention of private property in real estate.
- Garrett Hardin Quote

In our day (though not in earlier times) technical solutions are always welcome.
- Garrett Hardin Quote

Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution.
- Garrett Hardin Quote

Moreover, the practical recommendations deduced from ecological principles threaten the vested interests of commerce; it is hardly surprising that the financial and political power created by these investments should be used sometimes to suppress environmental impact studies.
- Garrett Hardin Quote

Of course, a positive growth rate might be taken as evidence that a population is below its optimum.
- Garrett Hardin Quote

The only kind of coercion I recommend is mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected.
- Garrett Hardin Quote

The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them.
- Garrett Hardin Quote

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights describes the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society. It follows that any choice and decision with regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the family itself, and cannot be made by anyone else.
- Garrett Hardin Quote

To say that we mutually agree to coercion is not to say that we are required to enjoy it, or even to pretend we enjoy it.
- Garrett Hardin Quote

You cannot do only one thing.
- Garrett Hardin Quote