That population cannot increase without the means of subsistence is a proposition so evident that it needs no illustration. That population does invariably increase where there are the means of subsistence, the history of every people that have ever existed will abundantly prove. And that the superior power of population cannot be checked without producing misery or vice, the ample portion of these too bitter ingredients in the cup of human life and the continuance of the physical causes that seem to have produced them bear too convincing a testimony. 

--T. Robert Malthus, 1798

The voluntary actions of men may originate in their opinions, but these opinions will be very differently modified in creatures compounded of a rational faculty and corporal propensities from what they would be in beings wholly intellectual. 

--T. Robert Malthus, 1798

The first great awakeners of the mind seem to be the wants of the body… They are the first stimulants that rouse the brain of infant man into sentient activity, and such seems to be the sluggishness of original matter that unless by a peculiar course of excitements other wants, equally powerful, are generated, these stimulants seem, even afterwards, to be necessary to continue that activity which they first awakened. 

--T. Robert Malthus, 1798

The powers of selection, combination, and transmutation, which every seed shews, are truly miraculous. Who can imagine that these wonderful faculties are contained in these little bits of matter? 

--T. Robert Malthus, 1789

Necessity has been with great truth called the mother of invention. Some of the noblest exertions of the human mind have been set in motion by the necessity of satisfying the wants of the body.

--T. Robert Malthus, 1798

The principal objects which human punishments have in view are undoubtedly restraint and example; restraint, or removal, of an individual member whose vicious habits are likely to be prejudicial to the society; and example, which by expressing the sense of the community with regard to a particular crime, and by associating more nearly and visibly crime and punishment, holds out a moral motive to dissuade others from the commission of it. 

--T. Robert Malthus, 1798

If the proportion between the natural increase of population and food which I have given be in any degree near the truth, it will appear, on the contrary, that the period when the number of men surpass their means of subsistence has long since arrived, and that this necessity oscillation, this constantly subsisting cause of periodical misery, has existed ever since we have had any histories of mankind, does exist at present, and will for ever continue to exist, unless some decided change take place in the physical constitution of our nature. 

--T. Robert Malthus, 1798

The proper office of benevolence is to soften the partial evils arising from self-love, but it can never be substituted in its place. 

--T. Robert Malthus, 1798

But if we proceed without a thorough knowledge and accurate comprehension of the nature, extent, and magnitude of the difficulties we have to encounter, or if we unwisely direct our efforts towards an object in which we cannot hope for success, we shall not only exhaust our strength in fruitless exertions and remain at as great a distance as ever from the summit of our wishes, but we shall be perpetually crushed by the recoil of this rock of Sisyphus. 

--T. Robert Malthus, 1798

Who says organization, says oligarchy.

--Robert Michels, 1915

Paranoia runs deep.

--Buffalo Springfield

The interests of an economically dominant class never stand naked.  They are enshrouded in the flag, fortified by the law, protected by the police, nurtured by the media, taught by the schools, and blessed by the church.

--Michael Parenti, 1978

The welfare-state government is not itself the initiator of most production within the economy.  The corporations do that.  However, that same government is increasingly charged with arranging the preconditions for profitable production.  Its funds, its power, its political survival, depend on private sector performance.  So do the jobs of most workers.  The state's interest in perpetuating its own rule is thus, in economic fact, identified with the health of the capitalist economy.

--Michael Harrington, 1976

A high level of bureaucratic rationality and of technology does not mean a high level of either individual or social intelligence.  From the first you cannot infer the second.  For social, technological, or bureaucratic rationality is not merely a grand summation of the individual will and capacity to reason.  The very chance to acquire that will and that capacity seems in fact often to be decreased by it.

--C. Wright Mills, 1959

For under a stationary (or even a slow growing capitalism), continued efforts of the lower and middle classes to improve their positions can be met only by diminishing the absolute incomes of the upper echelons of society.

--Robert Heilbroner, 1980

There is only one way to achieve happiness on this terrestrial ball, and that is to have either a clear conscience or none at all.

--Ogden Nash, (1902-1971)