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Thomas Robert Malthus
62 quotes
“It is an acknowledged truth in philosophy that a just theory will always be confirmed by experiment.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio, Subsistence, increases only in an arithmetical ratio.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To remedy the frequent distresses of the common people, the poor laws of England have been instituted; but it is to be feared that though they may have alleviated a little the intensity of individual misfortune, they have spread the general evil over a much larger surface.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I feel no doubt whatever that the parish laws of England have contributed to raise the price of provisions and to lower the real price of labour.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To prevent the recurrence of misery is, alas! beyond the power of man.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other vist the human race.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Though I may not be able to in the present instance to mark the limit at which further improvement will stop, I can very easily mention a point at which it will not arrive.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It cannot be true, therefore, that among animals some of the offspring will possess the desirable qualities of the parents in greater degree, or that animals are indefinitely perfectible.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I know of no well-directed attempts of this kind, except in the ancient family of the Bickerstaffs, who are said to have been very successful in whitening the skins and increasing the height of their race by prudent marriages, particularly by that very judicious cross with Maud, the milk- maid, by which some capital defects in the constitutions of the family were corrected.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Man cannot live in the midst of plenty.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I happen to have a very bad fit of the tooth-ache at the time I am writing this.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The moment we leave past experience as the foundation of our conjectures concerning the future; and still more, if our conjectures absolutely contradict past experience, we are thrown upon a wide field of uncertainty, and any one supposition is then just as good as another.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Persons almost entirely unacquainted with the powers of a machine, cannot be expected to guess at its effects.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Had population and food increased in the same ratio, it is probable that man might never have emerged from the savage state.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The greatest talents have been frequently misapplied and have produced evil proportionate to the extent of their powers. Both reason and revelation seem to assure us that such minds will be condemned to eternal death, but while on earth, these vicious instruments performed their part in the great mass of impressions, by the disgust and abhorrence which they excited.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Evil exists in the world not to create despair but activity.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If I saw a glass of wine repeatedly presented to a man, and he took no notice of it, I should be apt to think that he was blind or uncivil. A juster philosophy might teach me rather to think that my eyes deceived me, and that the offer was not really what I conceived it to be.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The germs of existence contained in this spot of earth, with ample food, and ample room to expand in, would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The immediate cause of the increase of population is the excess of the births above deaths; and the rate of increase, or the period of doubling, depends upon the proportion which the excess of the births above the deaths bears to the population.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The main peculiarity which distinguishes man from other animals, is the means of his support, is the power which he possesses of very greatly increasing these means.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The finest minds seem to be formed rather by efforts at original thinking, by endeavours to form new combinations, and to discover new truths, than by passively receiving the impressions of other men's ideas.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Not many years had elapsed after the first edition of this work, when it became known to all with whom Mr. Malthus had the opportunity of communicating on the subject, or who were acquainted with his last publications, that his opinions on the subject of value had undergone some change.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It has been said, and perhaps with truth, that the conclusions of Political Economy partake more of the certainty of the stricter sciences than those of most of the other branches of human knowledge.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To minds of a certain cast there is nothing so captivating as simplification and generalization.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The science of political economy is essentially practical, and applicable to the common business of human life. There are few branches of human knowledge where false views may do more harm, or just views more good.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The question is, what is saving?”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Surely then some distinction between the different kinds of labour, with reference to their different effects on national wealth, must be admitted to be not only useful, but necessary; and if so, the question is what this distinction should be, and where the line between the different kinds of labour should be drawn.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To estimate the value of Newton's discoveries, or the delight communicated by Shakespeare and Milton, by the price at which their works have sold, would be but a poor measure of the degree in which they have elevated and enchanted their country; nor would it be less grovelling and incongruous to estimate the benefit which the country has derived from the Revolution of 1688, by the pay of the soldiers, and all other payments concerned in effecting it.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The proposition of Mr. Ricardo, which states that a rise in the price of labour lowers the price of a large class of commodities, has undoubtedly a very paradoxical air; but it is, nevertheless, true, and the appearance of paradox would vanish, if it were stated more naturally and correctly.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If a country can only be rich by running a successful race for low wages, I should be disposed to say at once, perish such riches!”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But, fortunately for mankind, the neat rents of the land, under a system of private property, can never be diminished by the progress of cultivation.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is quite obvious therefore, that the knowledge and prudence of the poor themselves, are absolutely the only means by which any general and permanent improvement in their condition can be effected. They are really the arbiters of their own destiny; and what others can do for themselves. These truths are so important to the happiness of the great mass of society, that every opportunity should be taken of repeating them.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“THERE is scarcely any inquiry more curious, or, from its importance, more worthy of attention, than that which traces the causes which practically check the progress of wealth in different countries, and stop it, or make it proceed very slowly, while the power of production remains comparatively undiminished, or at least would furnish the means of a great and abundant increase of produce and population.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In general it may be said that demand is quite as necessary to the increase of capital as the increase of capital is to demand.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A feather will weigh down a scale when there is nothing in the opposite one.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is a mere futile process to exchange one set of commodities for another, if the parties; after this new distribution of goods has taken place, are not better off than they were before.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not the most pleasant employment to spend eight hours a day in a counting house.”
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source