Thomas Malthus Quotes

Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio.

The population forecast for the United States in 1970 is 170 million. The population forecast for Russia alone in 1970 is 251 million. The implications are clear.

There is a statistic I heard a number of years ago: if you know somebody who is 85 years old, that person was born into a world that had a third as many people as the world does today. The population has tripled in the past 85 years.

We are going to strangle ourselves in our own growth.

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.

Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.

For if we can remove the turbulent Gallics [French], our people according to exactest computations, will in another century, become even more numerous than England itself.

In the last 200 years the population of our planet has grown exponentially, at a rate of 1.9% per year. If it continued at this rate, with the population doubling every 40 years, by 2600 we would all be standing literally shoulder to shoulder.

The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg- eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.

Life is exponential. Two becomes four, becomes ten thousand, becomes a plague.

We're up at almost seven billion people on the planet and most of that growth has been in the developing world.

By 2022, China is expected to cede the dubious distinction of being the world's most populous nation to India, according to the population division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

The great increase of our population throughout the Union will alone produce an important effect, and in no quarter will it be so sensibly felt as in those in contemplation.

The rate of population growth in the United States is slightly below that required to reproduce itself.

In a region with a growing population, if you're doing nothing, you're losing ground.

I do not believe you can have infinite population or economic growth in a finite world. We are living on the shoulders of some awesome geometric curves.

An exponential growth is a simple doubling. One becomes two becomes four.

There are reasons for believing that the English increase will far surpass others, and that the diffusion of the United States will ultimately produce the general population of America.

The optimum population is, then, less than the maximum.

As the population of Georgia increased dramatically, so did development.

Immigration is one of the leading contributors to population growth.

When I was born, there were three billion people on the planet.

In only 37 years, our population will grow by a number equivalent to all the people in the world at the beginning of World War II.

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.

Man will survive as a species for one reason: He can adapt to the destructive effects of our power-intoxicated technology and of our ungoverned population growth, to the dirt, pollution and noise of a New York or Tokyo. And that is the tragedy. It is not man the ecological crisis threatens to destroy but the quality of human life.