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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

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Thomas Malthus
Age: 68 †
Born: 1766
Born: February 14
Died: 1834
Died: December 23
Anglican Priest
Demographer
Economist
Essayist
Mathematician
Scientist
Sociologist
Statistician
Warwickshire
England
Thomas R. Malthus
Suffering
Blank
Nature
Drawn
Persons
Inevitable
Human
Unhappy
Humans
Suffer
Must
Laws
Great
Beings
Lottery
Life
Law
Appeared

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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.
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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.
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A great emigration necessarily implies unhappiness of some kind or other in the country that is deserted.
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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?
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Evil exists in the world not to create despair but activity.
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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.
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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.
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The world's population will multiply more rapidly than the available food supply.
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The natural inequality of the two powers of population and of production in the earth, and that great law of our nature which must constantly keep their efforts equal, form the great difficulty that to me appears insurmountable in the way to the perfectibility of society.
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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.
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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.
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On the whole it may be observed, that the specific use of a body of unproductive consumers, is to give encouragement to wealth by maintaining such a balance between produce and consumption as will give the greatest exchangeable value to the results of the national industry.
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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.
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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.
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It is an acknowledged truth in philosophy that a just theory will always be confirmed by experiment.
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To minds of a certain cast there is nothing so captivating as simplification and generalization.
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In prosperous times the mercantile classes often realize fortunes, which go far towards securing them against the future but unfortunately the working classes, though they share in the general prosperity, do not share in it so largely as in the general adversity.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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