Top 70 Thomas Malthus Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The world’s population will multiply more rapidly than the available food supply.”

— Thomas Malthus

2. “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.”

— Thomas Malthus

3. “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.”

— Thomas Malthus

4. “The perpetual struggle for room and food.”

— Thomas Malthus

5. “Man cannot live in the midst of plenty.”

— Thomas Malthus

6. “A feather will weigh down a scale when there is nothing in the opposite one.”

— Thomas Malthus

7. “Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will shew the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second.”

— Thomas Malthus

8. “The superior power of population cannot be checked without producing misery or vice.”

— Thomas Malthus

9. “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.”

— Thomas Malthus

10. “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

11. “The histories of mankind are histories only of the higher classes.”

— Thomas Malthus

12. “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.”

— Thomas Malthus

13. “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.”

— Thomas Malthus

14. “The most baleful mischiefs may be expected from the unmanly conduct of not daring to face truth because it is unpleasing.”

— Thomas Malthus

15. “A great emigration necessarily implies unhappiness of some kind or other in the country that is deserted.”

— Thomas Malthus

16. “To prevent the recurrence of misery is, alas! beyond the power of man.”

— Thomas Malthus

17. “The rich, by unfair combinations, contribute frequently to prolong a season of distress among the poor.”

— Thomas Malthus

18. “The ordeal of virtue is to resist all temptation to evil.”

— Thomas Malthus

19. “Evil exists in the world not to create despair but activity.”

— Thomas Malthus

20. “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!”

— Thomas Malthus

21. “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.”

— Thomas Malthus

22. “Nature herself in times of great poverty or bad climatic conditions, as well as poor harvest, intervenes to restrict the increase of population of certain countries or races; this, to be sure, by a method as wise as it is ruthless.”

— Thomas Malthus

23. “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 Malthus

24. “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.”

— Thomas Malthus

25. “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 Malthus

26. “Whether the law of marriage be instituted or not, the dictate of nature and virtue seems to be an early attachment to one woman.”

— Thomas Malthus

27. “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 Malthus

28. “Had population and food increased in the same ratio, it is probable that man might never have emerged from the savage state.”

— Thomas Malthus

29. “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 Malthus

30. “Population, when unchecked, goes on doubling itself every 25 years or increases in a geometrical ratio.”

— Thomas Malthus

31. “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

32. “Hard as it may appear in individual cases, dependent poverty ought to be held disgraceful.”

— Thomas Malthus

33. “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.”

— Thomas Malthus

34. “Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.”

— Thomas Malthus

35. “A writer may tell me that he thinks man will ultimately become an ostrich. I cannot properly contradict him.”

— Thomas Malthus

36. “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 Malthus

37. “In a state therefore of great equality and virtue, where pure and simple manners prevailed, the increase of the human species would evidently be much greater than any increase that has been hitherto known.”

— Thomas Malthus

38. “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.”

— Thomas Malthus

39. “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.”

— Thomas Malthus

40. “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

41. “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?”

— Thomas Malthus

42. “The proposition of Mr. Ricardo, which states that a rise in the price of labour lowers the price of a large class of commodities, has undoubtedly a very paradoxical air; but it is, nevertheless, true, and the appearance of paradox would vanish, if it were stated more naturally and correctly.”

— Thomas Malthus

43. “The prodigious waste of human life occasioned by this perpetual struggle for room and food, was more than supplied by the mighty power of population, acting, in some degree, unshackled, from the constant habit of emigration.”

— Thomas Malthus

44. “The most effectual encouragement to population is, the activity of industry, and the consequent multiplication of the national products.”

— Thomas Malthus

45. “Capitals accumulate faster than population.”

— Thomas Malthus

46. “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.”

— Thomas Malthus

47. “Each pursues his own theory, little solicitous to correct or improve it by an attention to what is advanced by his opponents.”

— Thomas Malthus

48. “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.”

— Thomas Malthus

49. “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.”

— Thomas Malthus

50. “Malthus married in 1804 and beat three children with his wife.”

— Thomas Malthus