Politics & Power Quote by Evel Knievel

Coming from Evel Knievel, the patron saint of American spectacle and self-inflicted risk, this reads like a jump-ramp from stunt talk into survival talk. He isn’t theorizing geopolitics; he’s translating anxiety into plain, combustible imagery: future wars won’t be about shiny status goods but about the infrastructure you can’t flex on a poster - water and power. It’s a warning delivered in the idiom of a man who made a career out of betting his body against physics: ignore basic constraints long enough and the crash stops being metaphorical.

The line’s rough seams are part of its force. “Slow down our population, slow down our birth control” is an awkward, almost self-contradictory phrasing, suggesting a speaker reaching for policy language without fully owning it. That slip matters: it reveals the cultural muddle around reproductive politics in late-20th-century America, where “population control” fears mingled with moral panic about contraception. Knievel’s intent is less to legislate than to jolt - to insist that demographics and resources are not abstract, they’re destiny.

Subtextually, he’s swapping out the Cold War’s ideological theater for a more brutal calculus. Diamonds and gold stand in for the old story of greed and empire; water and power signal scarcity, climate pressure, failing systems. An entertainer making this pivot also tells you something about the era: environmental and resource anxieties had leaked out of expert circles and into mass intuition. Knievel, the showman, senses the next big disaster plot - and it isn’t a stunt you can walk away from.