Thomas Robert Malthus - On the Principle of Population

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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 Robert Malthus
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.

Thomas Robert Malthus
Though I may not be able to in the present instance to mark the limit at which further improvement will stop, I can very easily mention a point at which it will not arrive.

Thomas Robert Malthus
Yet in all societies, even those that are most vicious, the tendency to a virtuous attachment is so strong that there is a constant effort towards an increase of population. This constant effort as constantly tends to subject the lower classes of the society to distress and to prevent any great permanent amelioration of their condition.

Thomas Robert Malthus
The finest minds seem to be formed rather by efforts at original thinking, by endeavours to form new combinations, and to discover new truths, than by passively receiving the impressions of other men's ideas.

Thomas Robert Malthus
The labouring poor, to use a vulgar expression, seem always to live from hand to mouth. Their present wants employ their whole whole attention, and they seldom think of the future. Even when they have an opportunity of saving they seldom exercise it, but all that is beyond their present neccessities goes, generally speaking, to the ale house.

Thomas Robert Malthus
I happen to have a very bad fit of the tooth-ache at the time I am writing this.

Thomas Robert Malthus
I know of no well-directed attempts of this kind, except in the ancient family of the Bickerstaffs, who are said to have been very successful in whitening the skins and increasing the height of their race by prudent marriages, particularly by that very judicious cross with Maud, the milk- maid, by which some capital defects in the constitutions of the family were corrected.

Thomas Robert Malthus
No limits whatever are placed to the productions of the earth; they may increase forever.

Thomas Robert Malthus
The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other vist the human race.

Thomas Robert Malthus
The rich, by unfair combinations, contribute frequently to prolong a season of distress among the poor.

Thomas Robert Malthus
Every endeavor should be used to weaken and destroy all those institutions relating to corporations, apprenticeships, &c, which cause the labours of agriculture to be worse paid than the labours of trade and manufactures.

Thomas Robert Malthus
Evil exists in the world not to create despair but activity.

Thomas Robert Malthus
It cannot be true, therefore, that among animals some of the offspring will possess the desirable qualities of the parents in greater degree, or that animals are indefinitely perfectible.

Thomas Robert Malthus
It accords with the most liberal spirit of philosophy to suppose that not a stone can fall, or a plant rise, without the immediate agency of divine power.

Thomas Robert Malthus
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 Robert Malthus
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.

Thomas Robert Malthus
The love of independence is a sentiment that surely none would wish to see erased from the breast of man, though the parish law of England, it must be confessed, is a system of all others the most calculated gradually to weaken this sentiment, and in the end may eradicate it completely.

Thomas Robert Malthus
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.

Thomas Robert Malthus