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

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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 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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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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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 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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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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To minds of a certain cast there is nothing so captivating as simplification and generalization.
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No limits whatever are placed to the productions of the earth they may increase forever.
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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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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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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 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 ordeal of virtue is to resist all temptation to evil.
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It may at first appear strange, but I believe it is true, that I cannot by means of money raise a poor man and enable him to live much better than he did before, without proportionably depressing others in the same class.
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To prevent the recurrence of misery is, alas! beyond the power of man.
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Population, when unchecked, goes on doubling itself every 25 years or increases in a geometrical ratio.
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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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The superior power of population cannot be checked without producing misery or vice.
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The most baleful mischiefs may be expected from the unmanly conduct of not daring to face truth because it is unpleasing.
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