Robert Malthus Quotes & Sayings

The real perfectibility of man may be illustrated, as I have
mentioned before, by the perfectibility of a plant. The object of the
enterprising florist is, as I conceive, to unite size, symmetry, and beauty
of colour. It would surely be presumptuous in the most successful
improver to affirm, that he possessed a carnation in which these
qualities existed in the greatest possible state of perfection. However
beautiful his flower may be, other care, other soil, or other suns, might
produce one still more beautiful. — Thomas Robert Malthus

any great interference with the affairs of other people is a species of tyranny, — Thomas Robert Malthus

All that I can say is, that the wisest and best men in all ages had agreed in giving the preference, very greatly, to the pleasures of intellect; and that my own experience completely confirmed the truth of their decisions; that I had found sensual pleasures vain, transient, and continually attended with tedium and disgust; but that intellectual pleasures appeared to me ever fresh and young, filled up all my hours satisfactorily, gave a new zest to life, and diffused a lasting serenity over my mind — Thomas Robert Malthus

The vices and moral weakness of man are not invincible: Man is perfectible, or in other words, susceptible of perpetual improvement. — Thomas Robert Malthus

nothing is so easy as to find fault with human institutions; nothing so difficult as to suggest adequate practical improvements. — Thomas Robert Malthus

There can be little doubt that the equalization of property which we have supposed, added to the circumstance of the labour of the whole community being directed chiefly to agriculture, would tend greatly to augment the produce of the country. — Thomas Robert Malthus

I knew I was lost inside the world, watching it and trying to understand why too often I felt like I was standing just beyond the frame - of everything. — Jacqueline Woodson

The mathematics of Malthus? A quick Internet search led him to information about a prominent nineteenth-century English mathematician and demographist named Thomas Robert Malthus, who had famously predicted an eventual global collapse due to overpopulation. — Dan Brown

With only 2 percent of the world's proven reserves of oil, we in the United States can pump until we are blue in the face and it will not change the fact that we need more diverse and more secure sources of energy. — Zack Wamp

everything is appropriated? — Thomas Robert Malthus

Like investigation, healthy doubt arises from the urge to know what is true
it challenges assumptions or the status quo in service of healing and freedom. In contrast, unhealthy doubt arises from fear or aversion, and it questions one's own basic potential or worth, or the value of another. — Tara Brach

The constancy of the laws of nature, or the certainty with which we may expect the same effects from the same causes, is the foundation of the faculty of reason. — Thomas Robert Malthus

Try it. What I am saying is experimental. You can do it, it is not a question of believing me. You have been fighting with your fear; accept it, and see what happens. Just sit silently and accept it, and say, "I have fear, so I am fear." In that very meditative state, "I am fear," freedom starts descending. When the acceptance is total, freedom has arrived. — Osho

I don't create poetry, I create myself, for me my poems are a way to me. — Edith Sodergran

Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. — Thomas Robert Malthus

It may be said with truth that man is always susceptible of
improvement — Thomas Robert Malthus

One principal reason is that the histories of mankind that we possess are histories only of the higher classes. We have but few accounts that can be depended upon of the manners and customs of that part of mankind where these retrograde and progressive movements chiefly take place. — Thomas Robert Malthus

During my first year as a pastor I performed funerals for 50 church members - and they were the wrong ones. — Roy Bell

In foreign policy, a modest acceptance of fate will often lead to discipline rather than indifference. The realization that we cannot always have our way is the basis of a mature outlook that rests on an ancient sensibility, for tragedy is not the triumph of evil over good so much as triumph of one good over another that causes suffering. Awareness of that fact leads to a sturdy morality grounded in fear as well as in hope. The moral benefits of fear bring us to two English philosophers who, like Machiavelli, have for centuries disturbed people of goodwill: Hobbes and Malthus. — Robert D. Kaplan

man as he really is, inert, sluggish, and averse from labour, unless compelled by necessity — Thomas Robert Malthus

I should be inclined, therefore, as I have hinted before, to consider the world and this life as the mighty process of God, not for the trial, but for the creation and formation of mind, a process necessary to awaken inert, chaotic matter into spirit, to sublimate the dust of the earth into soul, to elicit an ethereal spark from the clod of clay. And in this view of the subject, the various impressions and excitements which man receives through life may be considered as the forming hand of his Creator, acting by general laws, and awakening his sluggish existence, by the animating touches of the Divinity, into a capacity of superior enjoyment. The original sin of man is the torpor and corruption of the chaotic matter in which he may be said to be born. — Thomas Robert Malthus

Beware! Your mind is a target! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

I'm gonna make sure everybody get their justice. This the year for business, this the year for my book, this the year for the movie and this the year for getting even. I'm on my way. — Suge Knight

as long as a
great number of those impressions which form character, like the nice
motions of the arm, remain absolutely independent of the will of man,
though it would be the height of folly and presumption to attempt to
calculate the relative proportions of virtue and vice at the future periods
of the world, it may be safely asserted that the vices and moral
weakness of mankind, taken in the mass, are invincible. — Thomas Robert Malthus

Words are one of our chief means of adjusting to all the situations of life. The better control we have over words, the more successful our adjustment is likely to be. — Bergen Evans

The view which he has given of human life has a melancholy hue,
but he feels conscious that he has drawn these dark tints from a
conviction that they are really in the picture, and not from a jaundiced
eye or an inherent spleen of disposition. — Thomas Robert Malthus

spend all the wages they earn and enjoy themselves while they can appears to be evident from the number of families that, upon the failure of any great manufactory, immediately fall upon the parish, — Thomas Robert Malthus

The lower classes of people in Europe may at some future period
be much better instructed than they are at present; they may be taught
to employ the little spare time they have in many better ways than at
the ale-house; they may live under better and more equal laws than they
have ever hitherto done, perhaps, in any country; and I even conceive it
possible, though not probable that they may have more leisure; but it is
not in the nature of things that they can be awarded such a quantity of
money or subsistence as will allow them all to marry early, in the full
confidence that they shall be able to provide with ease for a numerous
family. — Thomas Robert Malthus

I feel about romance the same way I do about a vocation; it's a calling. — Alden Ehrenreich

Malthus's school was in the centre of the town of Adrianople, and was not one of those monkish schools where education is miserably limited to the bread and water of the Holy Scriptures. Bread is good and water is good, but the bodily malnutrition that may be observed in prisoners or poor peasants who are reduced to this diet has its counterpart in the spiritual malnutrition of certain clerics. These can recite the genealogy of King David of the Jews as far back as Deucalion's Flood, and behind the Flood to Adam, without a mistake, or can repeat whole chapters of the Epistles of Saint Paul as fluently as if they were poems written in metre; but in all other respects are as ignorant as fish or birds. — Robert Graves

The thought makes me reach back for my knife, my sharp, throat-cutting security blanket, as I look around. — Kendare Blake

face." I sat spellbound. Here it was - the image of grace I had been seeking: an aspiring father bringing unconditional acceptance to a child who had absolutely nothing to offer, no accolades or accomplishments, just herself in all of her vulnerability and scars and weaknesses. My eyes moistened. This is the love of a dad. Maybe - just maybe - this is the love of a Father. — Lee Strobel

A Christmas Carol is such a fool-proof story you can't louse it up. — Leonard Maltin

When stuck in the river, it is best to dive and swim to the bank yourself before someone drops a large stone on your chest in an attempt to hoosh you there. — A.A. Milne