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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.

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
Ground
Theory
Theories
Ought
Practicals
Philosophy
Account
Business
Practical
Firsts
Conclusion
First
Till
Things
Accounts

More quotes by Thomas Malthus

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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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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 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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Hard as it may appear in individual instances , dependent poverty ought to be held disgraceful.
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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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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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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 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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Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.
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A feather will weigh down a scale when there is nothing in the opposite one.
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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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To prevent the recurrence of misery is, alas! beyond the power of man.
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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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No limits whatever are placed to the productions of the earth they may increase forever.
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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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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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In prosperous times the mercantile classes often realize fortunes, which go far towards securing them against the future but unfortunately the working classes, though they share in the general prosperity, do not share in it so largely as in the general adversity.
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Evil exists in the world not to create despair but activity.
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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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