Thomas Malthus Quotes

Self-interest is not only a legitimate but a fundamental cause for national policy—one which needs no cloak of hypocrisy.

A policy which rules out and all moral purpose except national interest has a fatal lack of what is essential to enduring success.

… people are far from acting generally according to the dictates of their interests, but oftener in consequence of their passions, though it may even prove injurious to their interests.

We should not, however, proceed with the adventure simply because we are wound up and cannot stop.

Sentiment inspires me no less than reason.

Emotion is a rotten base for politics.

It’s much easier to have an attitude … than a policy.

Nine times out of ten your two smartest policy advisors disagree.

The English people would never consent to go to war for a cause in which England was not manifestly interested.

Governments almost never act with moral clarity and for very good reason. They are dealing with competing interests.

Experience cannot possibly have decided between two courses, so long as there has only been experience of one.

There's too little sense in the State Department of why things happened.

No quarrel ought ever be converted into a policy.

For the moment it appeared to me that the United States was trying to save itself at the expense of Britain.

If time is not pressing on you, there are more options than otherwise.

When fear, especially a fear for one’s own well-being, clouds decisions on public policy, the public ends up falling into a solipsistic trap – each individual is so concerned with his or her own particular future, that one fails to consider the best interests of the community as a whole.

We must not be shocked into impotence because we are afraid of the difficulty of the alternatives facing us.

In Quebec, people are moved too often by passion and too little by intelligence.

Our interests and our preferences may or may not be the same thing at the same time …. The unswerving pursuit of preferences over interests may compromise the advancement and protection of both.

Avoid false choices driven by ideology.

Values are faithfully applied to the facts before us, while ideology overrides whatever facts call theory into question.

There is something wrong with the way in which we make our decisions. The Government listen too much to the pollsters and the party managers. The trouble is that they are not even very good at politics, and they are entering too much into policy decisions. As a result, there is too much short-termism, too much reacting to events, and not enough shaping of events. We give the impression of being in office but not in power. Far too many important decisions are made for 36 hours' publicity.

Gad, sir, Churchill is right. The Govt. has evidently made an irrevocable decision to be guided by circumstances with a firm hand.

My husband [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] always said the President of the United States had the best information in the world on which to base the government's decisions as to policy in foreign relations. Part of this was because of the efficiency of the intelligence reports he received. Over the past few years, however, the CIA has become an agency not for gathering information and reporting it to those who make policy and take action, but it has itself made policy and taken action. And by so doing it has involved the government in situations from which no administration could quickly extricate itself.

We are apt to say that a foreign policy is successful only when the country, or at any rate the governing class, is united behind it. In reality, every line of policy is repudiated by a section, often by an influential section, of the country concerned.