Adam Smith Quotes
-
The government of an exclusive company of merchants is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatever.
-
It seldom happens, however, that a great proprietor is a great improver.
-
Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality.
-
China is a much richer country than any part of Europe.
-
In England, success in the profession of the law leads to some very great objects of ambition; and yet how few men, born to easy fortunes, have ever in this country been emminent in that profession?
-
the competition of the poor takes away from the reward of the rich.
-
The world neither ever saw, nor ever will see, a perfectly fair lottery.
-
That a joint stock company should be able to carry on successfully any branch of foreign trade, when private adventurers can come into any sort of open and fair competition with them, seems contrary to all experience.
-
The importation of gold and silver is not the principal, much less the sole benefit which a nation derives from its foreign trade.
-
This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and powerful, and to despise or, at least, neglect persons of poor and mean conditions, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.
-
That of beaver skins, of beaver wool, and of gum Senega, has been subjected to higher duties; Great Britain, by the conquest of Canada and Senegal, having got almost the monopoly of those commodities.
-
Hatred and anger are the greatest poison to the happiness of a good mind.
-
The retinue of a grandee in China or Indostan accordingly is, by all accounts, much more numerous and splendid than that of the richest subjects of Europe.
-
The violence and injustice of the rulers of mankind is an ancient evil, for which, I am afraid, the nature of human affairs can scarce admit a remedy.
-
The great affair, we always find, is to get money.
-
The liberal reward of labour, therefore, as it is the affect of increasing wealth, so it is the cause of increasing population. To complain of it, is to lament over the necessary effect and cause of the greatest public prosperity.
-
Lands for the purposes of pleasure and magnificence, parks, gardens, public walks, &c. possessions which are every where considered as causes of expence, not as sources of revenue, seem to be the only lands which, in a great and civilized monarchy, ought to belong the crown.
-
Monopoly of one kind or another, indeed, seems to be the sole engine of the mercantile system.
-
A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more, otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation.
-
The Hudson's Bay Company, before their misfortunes in the late war, had been much more fortunate than the Royal African Company.
-
By nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from a street porter, as a mastiff is from a greyhound,
-
Marriage is encouraged in China, not by the profitableness of children, but by the liberty of destroying them.
-
It is the natural effect of improvement, however, to diminish gradually the real price of almost all manufactures.
-
Avarice and injustice are always shortsighted, and they did not foresee how much this regulation must obstruct improvement, and thereby hurt in the long-run the real interest of the landlord.