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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.

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
Nature
Constantly
Insurmountable
Two
Population
Inequality
Form
Equal
Appears
Earth
Effort
Efforts
Must
Law
Production
Great
Society
Productions
Way
Natural
Powers
Keep
Difficulty
Perfectibility

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The superior power of population cannot be checked without producing misery or vice.
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No limits whatever are placed to the productions of the earth they may increase forever.
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To minds of a certain cast there is nothing so captivating as simplification and generalization.
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A feather will weigh down a scale when there is nothing in the opposite one.
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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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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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Evil exists in the world not to create despair but activity.
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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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It has appeared that from the inevitable laws of our nature, some human beings must suffer from want. These are the unhappy persons who, in the great lottery of life, have drawn a blank.
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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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Population, when unchecked, goes on doubling itself every 25 years or increases in a geometrical ratio.
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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 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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Thirty or forty proprietors, with incomes answering to between one thousand and five thousand a year, would create a much more effectual demand for the necessaries, conveniences, and luxuries of life, than a single proprietor possessing a hundred thousand a year.
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