Thomas Malthus
Thomas Malthus
The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus FRS was an English cleric and scholar, influential in the fields of political economy and demography. Malthus himself used only his middle name Robert...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionEconomist
Date of Birth14 February 1766
integrity may faces
The most baleful mischiefs may be expected from the unmanly conduct of not daring to face truth because it is unpleasing.
taken years land
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 be compared to a great reservoir of water, supplied by a moderate stream. The faster population increases, the more help will be got to draw off the water, and consequently an increasing quantity will be taken every year. But the sooner, undoubtedly, will the reservoir be exhausted, and the streams only remain.
class eugenics euthanasia
No state has hitherto existed (at least that we have any account of) ... that no check whatever has existed to early marriages, among the lower classes, from a fear of not providing well for their families, or among the higher classes, from a fear of lowering their condition in life.
struggle cooking emigration
The perpetual struggle for room and food.
vices population misery
The superior power of population cannot be checked without producing misery or vice.
class mankind higher
The histories of mankind are histories only of the higher classes.
exercise opportunity thinking
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.
agriculture corporations causes
Every endeavor should be used to weaken and destroy all those institutions relating to corporations, apprenticeships, &c, which cause the labours of agriculture to be worse paid than the labours of trade and manufactures.
men misery recurrence
To prevent the recurrence of misery is, alas! beyond the power of man.
philosophy fall agency
It accords with the most liberal spirit of philosophy to suppose that not a stone can fall, or a plant rise, without the immediate agency of divine power.
sex moving taken
No move towards the extinction of the passion between the sexes has taken place in the five or six thousand years that the world has existed.
encouragement population multiplication
The most effectual encouragement to population is, the activity of industry, and the consequent multiplication of the national products.
men law independence
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.
mean evil balance
The employment of the poor in roads and public works, and a tendency among landlords and persons of property to build, to improve and beautify their grounds, and to employ workmen and menial servants, are the means most within our power and most directly calculated to remedy the evils arising from that disturbance in the balance of produce and consumption.