Adam Smith Quotes
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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.
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The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes.
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Goods can serve many other purposes besides purchasing money, but money can serve no other purpose besides purchasing goods.
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I have no great faith in political arithmetic, and I mean not to warrant the exactness of either of these computations.
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By nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from a street porter, as a mastiff is from a greyhound,
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But though empires, like all the other works of men, have all hitherto proved mortal, yet every empire aims at immortality.
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The rulers of Great Britain have, for more than a century past, amused the people with the imagination that they possessed a great empire on the west side of the Atlantic. This empire, however, has hitherto existed in imagination only.
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How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.
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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.
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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?
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Monopoly of one kind or another, indeed, seems to be the sole engine of the mercantile system.
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The great affair, we always find, is to get money.
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The Hudson's Bay Company, before their misfortunes in the late war, had been much more fortunate than the Royal African Company.
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It seldom happens, however, that a great proprietor is a great improver.
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In the long-run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him, but the necessity is not so immediate.
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It is the natural effect of improvement, however, to diminish gradually the real price of almost all manufactures.
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There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.
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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.
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No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.
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A very poor man may be said in some sense to have a demand for a coach and six; he might like to have it; but his demand is not an effectual demand, as the commodity can never be brought to market in order to satisfy it.
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When I endeavour to examine my own conduct, when I endeavour to pass sentence upon it, and either to approve or condemn it, it is evident that, in all such cases, I divide myself, as it were, into two persons; and that I, the examiner and judge, represent a different character from that other I, the person whose conduct is examined into and judged of.
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By the removal of the unnecessary mouths, and by extracting from the farmer the full value of the farm, a greater surplus, or what is the same thing, the price of a greater surplus, was obtained for the proprietor...
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II. The tax which each individual is bound to pay ought to be certain, and not arbitrary.
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The government of an exclusive company of merchants is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatever.