Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Thomas Malthus

Image
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.
Thomas Malthus
Image
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.
Thomas Malthus
Image
The ordeal of virtue is to resist all temptation to evil.
Thomas Malthus
Image
It is an acknowledged truth in philosophy that a just theory will always be confirmed by experiment.
Thomas Malthus
Image
It is not the most pleasant employment to spend eight hours a day in a counting house.
Thomas Malthus
Image
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
Image
The world's population will multiply more rapidly than the available food supply.
Thomas Malthus
Image
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.
Thomas Malthus
Image
No limits whatever are placed to the productions of the earth they may increase forever.
Thomas Malthus
Image
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.
Thomas Malthus
Image
Evil exists in the world not to create despair but activity.
Thomas Malthus
Image
Population, when unchecked, goes on doubling itself every 25 years or increases in a geometrical ratio.
Thomas Malthus
Image
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.
Thomas Malthus
Image
A great emigration necessarily implies unhappiness of some kind or other in the country that is deserted.
Thomas Malthus
Image
The most baleful mischiefs may be expected from the unmanly conduct of not daring to face truth because it is unpleasing.
Thomas Malthus
Image
Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.
Thomas Malthus
Image
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.
Thomas Malthus
Image
In general it may be said that demand is quite as necessary to the increase of capital as the increase of capital is to demand.
Thomas Malthus
Image
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.
Thomas Malthus
Image
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.
Thomas Malthus