Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Man cannot live in the midst of plenty.
The perpetual struggle for room and food.
Capitals accumulate faster than population
Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.
The ordeal of virtue is to resist all temptation to evil.
Evil exists in the world not to create despair but activity.
Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio.
Malthus married in 1804 and beat three children with his wife
The histories of mankind are histories only of the higher classes.
To prevent the recurrence of misery is, alas! beyond the power of man.
A feather will weigh down a scale when there is nothing in the opposite one.
The world's population will multiply more rapidly than the available food supply.
The superior power of population cannot be checked without producing misery or vice.
It is not the most pleasant employment to spend eight hours a day in a counting house.
No limits whatever are placed to the productions of the earth; they may increase forever.
The friend of the present order of things condemns all political speculations in the gross.
Hard as it may appear in individual instances , dependent poverty ought to be held disgraceful.
To minds of a certain cast there is nothing so captivating as simplification and generalization.
It is an acknowledged truth in philosophy that a just theory will always be confirmed by experiment.
Where are we to look for the consumption required but among the unproductive labourers of Adam Smith?.
The rich, by unfair combinations, contribute frequently to prolong a season of distress among the poor.
Population, when unchecked, goes on doubling itself every 25 years or increases in a geometrical ratio.
A great emigration necessarily implies unhappiness of some kind or other in the country that is deserted.
The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.
A writer may tell me that he thinks man will ultimately become an ostrich. I cannot properly contradict him.
I do not know that any writer has supposed that on this earth man will ultimately be able to live without food.
I think it will be found that experience, the true source and foundation of all knowledge, invariably confirms its truth.
The most baleful mischiefs may be expected from the unmanly conduct of not daring to face truth because it is unpleasing.
Had population and food increased in the same ratio, it is probable that man might never have emerged from the savage state.
Each pursues his own theory, little solicitous to correct or improve it by an attention to what is advanced by his opponents.
In general it may be said that demand is quite as necessary to the increase of capital as the increase of capital is to demand.
Whether the law of marriage be instituted or not, the dictate of nature and virtue seems to be an early attachment to one woman.
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!
The most effectual encouragement to population is, the activity of industry, and the consequent multiplication of the national products.
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.
I feel no doubt whatever that the parish laws of England have contributed to raise the price of provisions and to lower the real price of labour.
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.
In 1860, sixty-three per cent of the couples married in Great Britain had families of four or more children; in 1925 only twenty per cent had more than four.
The passion between the sexes has appeared in every age to be so nearly the same, that it may always be considered, in algebraic language as a given quantity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.