"Malthus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... constant state of embarrassment, none perhaps is more deeply to be lamented than the great check which this difficulty of finding a profitable occupation for labour has proved to the progress of population. Mr. Malthus, who has immortalized himself by his essay on this branch of political economy, has so satisfactorily shewn that the increase of population is proportioned to the facility of procuring subsistence, and administering to the various wants of a family, ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... from correspondence that your explanation of your law is the same as that which I offer. You are right, that I came to the conclusion that selection was the principle of change from the study of domesticated productions; and then, reading Malthus, I saw at once how to apply this principle. Geographical distribution and geological relations of extinct to recent inhabitants of South America first led me to the subject: especially the case of the Galapagos Islands. I hope to go to press in the early part of next month. It will ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... speech. The confirmed spinsters (high and low, rich and poor, we counted seventy-three of them in Troy) seemed to like him none the less because he lost no occasion, public or private, of commending wedlock. For the doctrine of Mr. Malthus (recently promoted to a Professorship at the East India College) he had a robust contempt. He openly regretted that, owing to the negligence of our forefathers, the outbreak of war found Great Britain ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... immediate pupils James Mill is the ablest, Cobbett, a vigorous and idiomatic writer of English, in the course of his long life advocated all varieties of political principle. In political science we have the accurate McCulloch; Malthus, known through his Theory of Population; and Ricardo, the most original thinker in science ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... its extraordinary schemes, and machinery of Corresponding Boards and the like, we shall not so much as glance. Enough for us to understand that Heuschrecke is a disciple of Malthus; and so zealous for the doctrine, that his zeal almost literally eats him up. A deadly fear of Population possesses the Hofrath; something like a fixed idea; undoubtedly akin to the more diluted forms of Madness. Nowhere, in that quarter of his intellectual ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... at my lodgings on the Quai Malthus, and I had but little appetite, having fed upon such an unexpected variety of emotions ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... collected facts, 1837-42; drew up a sketch, 1842; enlarged it in 1844; previous speculations on the subject; views of Erasmus Darwin, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, and Lamarck; Darwin's opinion of Lamarck; influence of Lyell; influence of South American experience; reads Malthus on Population; "Vestiges of Creation "; Mr. Herbert Spencer and evolution; Lyell's letters; Sir Joseph Hooker on species; Mr. A. R. Wallace communicates his views to Darwin; Lyell and Hooker persuade Darwin to ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... reputation (but then it must be very well ascertained before he admits it)—and has a favourite hypothesis that Understanding and Virtue are the same thing. Mr. Godwin possesses a high degree of philosophical candour, and studiously paid the homage of his pen and person to Mr. Malthus, Sir James Macintosh, and Dr. Parr, for their unsparing attacks on him; but woe to any poor devil who had the hardihood to defend him against them! In private, the author of Political Justice at one time reminded those who knew him of the metaphysician ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... of the nineteenth century upon this point was little short of insane. The melancholy doctrine of Malthus had perverted the public mind. Because it was difficult for a poor man to bring up a family, the hasty conclusion was reached that a family ought not to be brought up. But the war has entirely inverted and corrected this point of view. ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... Over-population; Malthus—the danger of applying his prudential check; his originality; his phrase of misery check is in many cases too severe; decaying races ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... on this last date there is some room, not for doubt, but for surprise. The passage in the Autobiography{12} is quite clear, namely that in October 1838 he read Malthus's Essay on the principle of Population and "being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence ..., it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... obstacles, only to be removed by a better general education extended to the mass of the people. It is desirable that the community should be indoctrinated with sound views of property, and with the dependence of wealth, upon the true principle of population, discovered by Malthus, all which ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... their population was not sufficient, and recourse was had to the purchase of slaves, which was made even in the provinces of the East subject to the Romans. It is, moreover, known that slavery is a state little favorable to population. (See Hume's Essay, and Malthus on population, i. 334.—G.) The testimony of Appian (B.C. l. i. c. 7) is decisive in favor of the rapid multiplication of the agricultural slaves; it is confirmed by the numbers engaged in the servile wars. Compare also Blair, p. 119; likewise ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... prevented than by making the young and sleek furnish the starving with a plump existence? Is it not, economically viewed, the principle of Dr. Franklin's smoke-consuming pipe applied to the infinitely more important sphere of human existence? The festive table, to which, according to the great Malthus, Nature declines inviting a large portion of every well-peopled country, will never be known by the happy Fijian Say or Senior, so long as wise conservatism shall not change its old and sacred laws, and shall allow Nature to invite one happy portion ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... sword, to dispute my life and the crown with my brothers? Is not that the destiny, almost of all the sons of Hindustan?'[6] Now that they have become pensioners of the British Government, the members increase like white ants; and, as Malthus has it, 'press so hard against their means of subsistence' that a great many of them are absolutely starving, in spite of the enormous pension the head of the family ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... starvation. For, to speak in the words of the economists, the expense incurred in maintaining them would not be reproduced, would be money thrown away, and to this end no man advances capital; and, so far, Malthus was perfectly right in his theory of population. The only difference as compared with the old, outspoken slavery is this, that the worker of to-day seems to be free because he is not sold once for all, but piecemeal by the day, the week, the year, and because no one owner sells him to another, ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... help the reader some way up the ladder of learning; but they do not link themselves with his affections. I myself prefer the affections to the sciences. The story of the heart is the deepest of all histories; and Shakespeare is profounder and longer lived than Maclaurin, or Malthus, or Ricardo. ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... are riches? what is rent? what is value? Monsieur Say, the most sparkling of them all, assures us that the English writers are obscure, by their confounding, like Smith, the denomination of labour. The vivacious Gaul cries out to the grave Briton, Mr. Malthus, "If I consent to employ your word labour, you must understand me," so and so! Mr. Malthus says, "Commodities are not exchanged for commodities only; they are also exchanged for labour;" and when the hypochondriac Englishman, with dismay, foresees ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Phillips, Horace Greeley, and other Protectionists, will probably constitute another. The Collection now embraces Quesnay, Turgot, Dupont Nemours, Le Tronne, the Says, Galliani, de Montyon, Condillac, Lavoisier, Adam Smith, Hume, Ricardo, Malthus, Bentham, and a dozen more. The only American name in the list is that of Franklin quoted in the first volume of the Melanges, edited ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... experience. I shall always respect War hereafter. The cost of life, the dreary havoc of comfort and time, are overpaid by the vistas it opens of Eternal Life, Eternal Law, reconstructing and uplifting Society, —breaks up the old horizon, and we see through the rifts a wider. The dismal Malthus, the dismal DeBow, ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... young man. Their suffrage gained, that of the rest began to follow. For, in truth, there are few things of which the light is less to be hid than that of a good newspaper. "The Register," by degrees, won a general esteem, and began to prosper. And as, according to the discovery of Malthus, Prosperity is fond of pairing, it soon happened that our printer went to falling in love. Naturally again, being a printer, he, from a regard for the eternal fitness of things, fell in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... attention. It was the outcome of thirty years' work and thought by a worker and thinker of genius, but it was yet more than that—it was the outcome, also, of the work and thought of another man of genius fifty years before. The book of Malthus on the Principle of Population, mainly founded on the fact that animals increase in a geometrical ratio, and therefore, if unchecked, must encumber the earth, had been generally forgotten, and was only recalled with a sneer. But the genius of Darwin recognised ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... already," continued Lebedeff, not deigning to notice the interruption. "Malthus was a friend of humanity, but, with ill-founded moral principles, the friend of humanity is the devourer of humanity, without mentioning his pride; for, touch the vanity of one of these numberless philanthropists, and to avenge his self-esteem, ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... perverting canvas from its proper use by smearing it over with certain colours, fair indeed to look upon, but quite void of utility. I ought indeed to have made another exception, which is, that they are multiplying much faster than Mr. Malthus would approve. Cowper says somewhere of those who make the world older than the Bible accounts of it, that they have found out that He who made it and revealed its age to Moses was mistaken in the date. May it not be said of the anti-populationers ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... do without his potato as an adjunct; but the error of the Irishman is in making it the mainstay of his life. The words of Malthus in this connection put the matter in a nutshell, much as he has been abused for his theory of the effects of the potato on population. 'When the common people of a country,' he says, 'live principally upon the dearest grain, as they do in ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... a philosopher, a feudal queen, amid the blessings and the praise of dependent hundreds—that was my new ideal; for that I turned the whole force of my intellect to the study of history, of social and economic questions. From Bentham and Malthus to Fourier and Proudhon, I read them all. I made them all fit into that idol-temple of self which I was rearing, and fancied that I did my duty, by becoming one of the great ones of the earth. My ideal was not the crucified Nazarene, but some Hairoun ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... Malay houses. But they do not appear to hold them in dread, for I have seen men, women, children and crocodiles in the same water, and at the same time. That they, the crocodiles, are not converts to Malthus, is pretty apparent, from the number of tender infants they permit to be added to the census ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... is hardly conceivable—it seems hardly imaginable—yet it is so. It is indeed simply the law of Malthus exemplified. Mr. Malthus was a clergyman, who worked out this subject most minutely and truthfully some years ago; he showed quite clearly,—and although he was much abused for his conclusions at ...
— The Conditions Of Existence As Affecting The Perpetuation Of Living Beings • Thomas H. Huxley
... fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on, from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... circumstances are most favourable to variation. In the next chapter the struggle for existence among all organic beings throughout the world, which inevitably follows from the high geometrical ratio of their increase, will be considered. This is the doctrine of Malthus, applied to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms. As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... more than half a century of which he was rector of Claverton near Bath) Graves knew many interesting persons, from Shenstone and Whitefield (with both of whom he was at Pembroke College, Oxford, though he afterwards became a fellow of All Souls) to Malthus, who was a pupil of his; and he had some interesting private experiences. He wove a good deal that was personal into his novel, which, as may easily be guessed, is a satire upon Methodism, and in ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury |
