Thomas Malthus Quotes

33 quotes in 520 categories

• The prodigious waste of human life occasioned by this perpetual struggle for room and food, was more than supplied by the mighty power of population,…
• Hard as it may appear in individual cases, dependent poverty ought to be held disgraceful.
• The most baleful mischiefs may be expected from the unmanly conduct of not daring to face truth because it is unpleasing.
• Where there are few people, and a great quantity of fertile land, the power of the earth to afford a yearly increase of food may…
• The redundant population, necessarily occasioned by the prevalence of early marriages, must be repressed by occasional famines, and by the custom of exposing children, which,…
• No state has hitherto existed (at least that we have any account of) ... that no check whatever has existed to early marriages, among the…
• Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will shew the immensity of…
• The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.
• Each pursues his own theory, little solicitous to correct or improve it by an attention to what is advanced by his opponents.
• The perpetual struggle for room and food.
• The ordeal of virtue is to resist all temptation to evil.
• 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…
• A great emigration necessarily implies unhappiness of some kind or other in the country that is deserted.
• A writer may tell me that he thinks man will ultimately become an ostrich. I cannot properly contradict him.
• 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.
• The rich, by unfair combinations, contribute frequently to prolong a season of distress among the poor.
• 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…
• 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…
• The friend of the present order of things condemns all political speculations in the gross.
• It does not, however, seem impossible that by an attention to breed, a certain degree of improvement, similar to that among animals, might take place…

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