Adam Smith Quotes
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The importation of gold and silver is not the principal, much less the sole benefit which a nation derives from its foreign trade.
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It appears, accordingly, from the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves.
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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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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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No fixed capital can yield any revenue but by means of a circulating capital.
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the competition of the poor takes away from the reward of the rich.
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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.
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Hatred and anger are the greatest poison to the happiness of a good mind.
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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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It seldom happens, however, that a great proprietor is a great improver.
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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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The world neither ever saw, nor ever will see, a perfectly fair lottery.
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The great affair, we always find, is to get money.
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Marriage is encouraged in China, not by the profitableness of children, but by the liberty of destroying them.
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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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It is the natural effect of improvement, however, to diminish gradually the real price of almost all manufactures.
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In this consists the difference between the character of a miser and that of a person of exact economy and assiduity. The one is anxious about small matters for their own sake; the other attends to them only in consequence of the scheme of life which he has laid down to himself.
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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.
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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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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.