Thomas Malthus Quotes

Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague.

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

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.

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 first power in comparison of the second.

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

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, in times of distress, is probably more frequent than is ever acknowledged to Europeans.

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

The histories of mankind are histories only of the higher classes.

The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.

Nature herself in times of great poverty or bad climatic conditions, as well as poor harvest, intervenes to restrict the increase of population of certain countries or races; this, to be sure, by a method as wise as it is ruthless.

The labouring poor, to use a vulgar expression, seem always to live from hand to mouth. Their present wants employ their whole whole attention, and they seldom think of the future. Even when they have an opportunity of saving they seldom exercise it, but all that is beyond their present neccessities goes, generally speaking, to the ale house.

The rich, by unfair combinations, contribute frequently to prolong a season of distress among the poor.

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.

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

A feather will weigh down a scale when there is nothing in the opposite one.

The most successful supporters of tyranny are without doubt those general declaimers who attribute the distresses of the poor, and almost all evils to which society is subject, to human institutions and the iniquity of governments.

Had population and food increased in the same ratio, it is probable that man might never have emerged from the savage state.

The perpetual tendency of the race of man to increase beyond the means of subsistence is one of the general laws of animated nature, which we can have no reason to expect to change.

Population, when unchecked, goes on doubling itself every 25 years or increases in a geometrical ratio.

Thirty or forty proprietors, with incomes answering to between one thousand and five thousand a year, would create a much more effectual demand for the necessaries, conveniences, and luxuries of life, than a single proprietor possessing a hundred thousand a year.

The ordeal of virtue is to resist all temptation to evil.

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

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.

The transfer of three shillings and sixpence a day to every labourer would not increase the quantity of meat in the country. There is not at present enough for all to have a decent share. What would then be the consequence?

A writer may tell me that he thinks man will ultimately become an ostrich. I cannot properly contradict him.