T Malthus Quotes & Sayings

I do not know that any writer has supposed that on this earth man will ultimately be able to live without food. — Thomas Malthus

The most baleful mischiefs may be expected from the unmanly conduct of not daring to face truth because it is unpleasing. — Thomas Malthus

The great and unlooked for discoveries that have taken place of late years have all concurred to lead many men into the opinion that we were touching on a period big with the most important changes. — Thomas Malthus

The world's population will multiply more rapidly than the available food supply. — Thomas Malthus

It may at first appear strange, but I believe it is true, that I cannot by means of money raise a poor man and enable him to live much better than he did before, without proportionably depressing others in the same class. — Thomas Malthus

The superior power of population cannot be checked without producing misery or vice. — Thomas Malthus

Population trends have always provoked doom-fraught oracles, because their popular interpreters suppose that every new series will be infinitely sustained; yet, beyond the short term, expectations based on them are never fulfilled. — Thomas Malthus

It has appeared that from the inevitable laws of our nature, some human beings must suffer from want. These are the unhappy persons who, in the great lottery of life, have drawn a blank. — Thomas Malthus

To minds of a certain cast there is nothing so captivating as simplification and generalization. — Thomas Malthus

The exertions that men find it necessary to make, in order to support themselves or families, frequently awaken faculties that might otherwise have lain for ever dormant, and it has been commonly remarked that new and extraordinary situations generally create minds adequate to grapple with the difficulties in which they are involved. — Thomas Malthus

Evil exists in the world not to create despair but activity. — Thomas Malthus

Famine seems to be the last, the most dreadful resource of nature. The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world. — Thomas Malthus

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 first business of philosophy is to account for things as they are; and till our theories will do this, they ought not to be the ground of any practical conclusion. — Thomas Malthus

The main peculiarity which distinguishes man from other animals is the means of his support-the power which he possesses of very greatly increasing these means. — Thomas 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

The constant effort towards population, which is found even in the most vicious societies, increases the number of people before the means of subsistence are increased. — Thomas Malthus

The love of independence is a sentiment that surely none would wish to see erased from the breast of man, though the parish law of England, it must be confessed, is a system of all others the most calculated gradually to weaken this sentiment, and in the end may eradicate it completely. — Thomas Malthus

In a state therefore of great equality and virtue, where pure and simple manners prevailed, the increase of the human species would evidently be much greater than any increase that has been hitherto known. — Thomas Malthus

The passion between the sexes has appeared in every age to be so nearly the same, that it may always be considered, in algebraic language as a given quantity. — Thomas 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

With regard to the duration of human life, there does not appear to have existed from the earliest ages of the world to the present moment the smallest permanent symptom or indication of increasing prolongation. — Thomas Malthus

From Pastor Malthus to the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth; from hysteria over DDT, PCBs, and natural gas "fracking"; to continuing bouts of chemo-phobia and population panic; the achievements of capitalism have suffered a long series of detractions. The factitious and febrile campaign against global warming is only the latest binge of self-abuse among the children of prosperity. — George Gilder

A great emigration necessarily implies unhappiness of some kind or other in the country that is deserted. — Thomas Malthus

The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. — Thomas Malthus

If one fourth of the capital of a country were suddenly destroyed, or entirely transferred to a different part of the world, without any other cause occurring of a diminished demand for commodities, this scantiness of capital would certainly occasion great inconvenience to consumers, and great distress among the working classes; but it would be attended with great advantages to the remaining capitalists. — Thomas Malthus

The advances of agricultural and contraceptive technology in the nineteenth century apparently refuted Malthus: in England, the United States, Germany, and France the food supply kept pace with births, and the rising standard of living deferred the age of marriage and lowered the size of the family. — Will Durant

I think it will be found that experience, the true source and foundation of all knowledge, invariably confirms its truth. — Thomas Malthus

It is an acknowledged truth in philosophy that a just theory will always be confirmed by experiment. — Thomas Malthus

The moon is not kept in her orbit round the earth, nor the earth in her orbit round the sun, by a force that varies merely in the inverse ratio of the squares of the distances. — Thomas Malthus