“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

Source: An Essay on The Principle of Population (First Edition 1798, unrevised), Chapter V, paragraph 2, lines 1-5

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "To remedy the frequent distresses of the common people, the poor laws of England have been instituted; but it is to be …" by Thomas Robert Malthus?

Thomas Robert Malthus 60

British political economist 1766–1834

Related quotes

“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 (1766–1834) British political economist

Essay on the Principle of Population (1798; rev. through 1826)

“Some have too much, yet still do crave;
I little have, and seek no more:
They are but poor, though much they have,
And I am rich with little store:
They poor, I rich; they beg, I give;
They lack, I have; they pine, I live.”

Edward Dyer (1543–1607) courtier

MS. Rawl 85 (1588), p. 17.

“The greatest talents have been frequently misapplied and have produced evil proportionate to the extent of their powers.”

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) British political economist

Source: An Essay on The Principle of Population (First Edition 1798, unrevised), Chapter XIX, paragraph 2, lines 1-6
Context: The greatest talents have been frequently misapplied and have produced evil proportionate to the extent of their powers. Both reason and revelation seem to assure us that such minds will be condemned to eternal death, but while on earth, these vicious instruments performed their part in the great mass of impressions, by the disgust and abhorrence which they excited.

“Sometimes I fear that, if Harvard does not give up trying to turn itself from an Institution of Learning into an Educational Institution, we may have a generation of professors whose duty it will be to disseminate information which they have not the time to acquire.”

Edwin Boring (1886–1968) American psychologist

Edwin G. Boring (1942) Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology, Preface. p. xi

“The poor people, it is true, have been much less successful than the great.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

1760s, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765)
Context: The poor people, it is true, have been much less successful than the great. They have seldom found either leisure or opportunity to form a union and exert their strength; ignorant as they were of arts and letters, they have seldom been able to frame and support a regular opposition. This, however, has been known by the great to be the temper of mankind; and they have accordingly labored, in all ages, to wrest from the populace, as they are contemptuously called, the knowledge of their rights and wrongs, and the power to assert the former or redress the latter. I say RIGHTS, for such they have, undoubtedly, antecedent to all earthly government, — Rights, that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws — Rights, derived from the great Legislator of the universe.

“Perhaps I'm unrealistic. As long as people do not fully realize the danger of inflation, they may well pressure for more inflation as a short-term remedy for evils. Though we may well be driven into more, until people have learned the lesson, but that means that inflation may still do more of a great deal of harm, before it will be cured.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

1975 interview https://mises.org/library/hayek-meets-press-1975 on "Meet the Press."
1960s–1970s

“Earth-worms abound in England in many different stations. Their castings may be seen in extraordinary numbers on commons and chalk-downs, so as almost to cover the whole surface, where the soil is poor and the grass short and thin.”

Charles Darwin book The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms

Source: The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms (1881), Chapter 1: Habits of Worms, p. 9. http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=24&itemID=F1357&viewtype=image

“It is necessary that the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, eternal in their duration, be universal in their application, that being realized in institutions, law and customs, they spread over the surface of the globe and filter down to it's lowest strata. Only then shall the regeneration of man be accomplished.”

Francisco Luís Gomes (1829–1869) Indo-Portuguese physician, writer, historian, economist, political scientist and MP in the Portuguese parli…

Os Brâmanes (1866). Quoted by Teotonio R. de Souza in Essays in Goan history (1989), p. 137
Os Brâmanes (1866)

“These institutions have flourished by reason of a common background of experience; they have been perpetuated by a common faith in the righteousness of their purpose; they have been handed down undiminished in effectiveness from our forefathers who conceived their spirit and prepared the foundations. We have put into operation our faith in equal opportunity before the law in exchange for equal obligation of citizenship.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Whose Country Is This? (1921)

“Handel paralysed music in England for generations and they have not yet quite got over him.”

George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) German, later British Baroque composer

Frederick Delius, letter to Ethel Smyth, February 17, 1909; Lionel Carley Delius: A Life in Letters vol. 2 (1988) p. 9.
Criticism

“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.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Thomas Robert Malthus 60

Related quotes

Related topics