Thomas Malthus

The accumulation of capital is a powerful stimulus to the increase of population.

The progress of society is a constant struggle between the power of population and the power of production.

The true remedy for poverty is not charity, but industry and prudence.

The greatest good of the greatest number is the foundation of all sound policy.

The tendency of population to increase beyond the means of subsistence is a law of nature.

The checks to population are all resolvable into vice, misery, and moral restraint.

The increase of population is a constant pressure upon the means of subsistence.

The only way to prevent the increase of population beyond the means of subsistence is by moral restraint.

The poor have no right to marry and propagate children, unless they can support them.

The laws of nature are immutable and eternal.

The progress of society is a slow and arduous process.

Famine seems to be the last, the most dreadful resource of nature. 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.

All children who are born, beyond what would be required to keep up the population to a desired level, must necessarily perish, unless room be made for them by the deaths of grown persons.

The great law of necessity, which makes the earth produce only what is necessary for the subsistence of man, is the source of all misery.

It is an acknowledged principle in mechanics that natural action is always the cheapest.

The constant effort towards population, which is found to act even in the most vicious societies, increases the number of people before the means of subsistence are increased.

A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society does not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food.

The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation.

Moral restraint is the only positive check to population that can be compatible with the full development of the human faculties.

The history of civilization is a history of the gradual increase of means of subsistence and of the gradual diminution of the intensity of positive checks.