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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.

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
Human
Views
Humans
Economy
Applicable
Good
Knowledge
Essentially
Life
Common
Practicals
Business
Branches
Science
Practical
Political
False
May
Harm

More quotes by Thomas Malthus

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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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The ordeal of virtue is to resist all temptation to evil.
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A feather will weigh down a scale when there is nothing in the opposite one.
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Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.
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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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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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A great emigration necessarily implies unhappiness of some kind or other in the country that is deserted.
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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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The perpetual struggle for room and food.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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Evil exists in the world not to create despair but activity.
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