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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.

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
Form
Doctrine
Truth
Economics
Part
Forms
Problem
Population
Importance
Direct
Conspicuously
Doubt
Absent
Least
Vast

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The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.
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The germs of existence contained in this spot of earth, with ample food, and ample room to expand in, would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years.
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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.
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It is not the most pleasant employment to spend eight hours a day in a counting house.
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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.
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Malthus married in 1804 and beat three children with his wife
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A feather will weigh down a scale when there is nothing in the opposite one.
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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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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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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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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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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 world's population will multiply more rapidly than the available food supply.
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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 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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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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The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.
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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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