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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.

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
Power
Greatly
Mean
Increasing
Men
Main
Animals
Economy
Animal
Peculiarity
Support
Distinguishes
Means
Possesses

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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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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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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 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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The perpetual struggle for room and food.
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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.
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Whether the law of marriage be instituted or not, the dictate of nature and virtue seems to be an early attachment to one woman.
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Hard as it may appear in individual instances , dependent poverty ought to be held disgraceful.
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A feather will weigh down a scale when there is nothing in the opposite one.
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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.
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It is not the most pleasant employment to spend eight hours a day in a counting house.
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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!
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Had population and food increased in the same ratio, it is probable that man might never have emerged from the savage state.
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The constant effort towards population, which is found even in the most vicious societies, increases the number of people before the means of subsistence are increased.
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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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The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.
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The superior power of population cannot be checked without producing misery or vice.
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The ordeal of virtue is to resist all temptation to evil.
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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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