Using the commons as a cesspool does not harm the general public under frontier conditions, because there is no public, the same behavior in a metropolis is unbearable.

The social arrangements that produce responsibility are arrangements that create coercion, of some sort.

Why are ecologists and environmentalists so feared and hated? This is because in part what they have to say is new to the general public, and the new is always alarming.

We can't cure a shortage by increasing the supply.

The optimum population is, then, less than the maximum.

Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.

Economists (and others) who are satisfied with nature-free equations develop a dangerous hubris about the potency of our species