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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.

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
Poor
Tyranny
Iniquity
Society
Institutions
Supporters
Evil
Subject
Attribute
Government
General
Evils
Human
Subjects
Supporter
Humans
Doubt
Distress
Without
Successful
Attributes
Almost
Governments
Distresses

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Population, when unchecked, goes on doubling itself every 25 years or increases in a geometrical ratio.
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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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To minds of a certain cast there is nothing so captivating as simplification and generalization.
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Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.
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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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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 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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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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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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Evil exists in the world not to create despair but activity.
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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 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.
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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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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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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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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.
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A feather will weigh down a scale when there is nothing in the opposite one.
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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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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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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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