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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.

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
Series
Doom
Based
Infinitely
Short
Trends
Interpreters
Beyond
Fulfilled
Fraught
Term
Suppose
Oracles
Every
Popular
Provoked
Always
Population
Interpreter
Never
Expectations
Sustained

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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 do not know that any writer has supposed that on this earth man will ultimately be able to live without food.
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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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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.
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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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Evil exists in the world not to create despair but activity.
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The doctrine of population has been conspicuously absent, not because I doubt in the least its truth and vast importance, but because it forms no part of the direct problem of economics.
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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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Hard as it may appear in individual instances , dependent poverty ought to be held disgraceful.
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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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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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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 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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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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