Adam Smith Quotes
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Oatmeal indeed supplies the common people of Scotland with the greatest and best part of their food, which is in general much inferior to that of their neighbours of the same rank in England.
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Corn is a necessary, silver is only a superfluity.
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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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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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IV. Every tax ought to be contrived as both to take out and to keep out of the pockets of the people as little as possible, over and above what it brings into the public treasury of the state.
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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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It seldom happens, however, that a great proprietor is a great improver.
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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 annual produce of the land and labour of any nation can be increased in its value by no other means, but by increasing either the number of its productive labourers, or the productive powers of those labourers who had before been employed.
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It is not for its own sake that men desire money, but for the sake of what they can purchase with it.
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Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.
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Mercantile jealousy is excited, and both inflames, and is itself inflamed, by the violence of national animosity:...
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The natural price, therefore, is, as it were, the central price, to which the prices of all commodities are continually gravitating.
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It is unjust that the whole of society should contribute towards an expence of which the benefit is confined to a part of the society.
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If the importation of foreign cattle, for example, were made ever so free, so few could be imported, that the grazing trade of Great Britain could be little affected by it. Live cattle are, perhaps, the only commodity of which the transportation is more expensive by sea than by land.
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Fear is in almost all cases a wretched instrument of government, and ought in particular never to be employed against any order of men who have the smallest pretensions to independency.
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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 the profits of trade happen to be greater than ordinary, over-trading becomes a general error both among great and small dealers.
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China is a much richer country than any part of Europe.
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It may indeed be doubted, whether butcher's meat is any where a necessary of life. Grain and other vegetables, with the help of milk, cheese, and butter, or oil, where butter is not to be had, it is known from experience, can, without any butcher's meat, afford the most plentiful, the most wholesome, the most nourishing, and the most invigorating diet.
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Secrets in manufactures are capable of being longer kept than secrets in trade.
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Every faculty in one man is the measure by which he judges of the like faculty in another. I judge of your sight by my sight, of your ear by my ear, of your reason by my reason, of your resentment by my resentment, of your love by my love. I neither have, nor can have, any other way of judging about them.
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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.
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To give the monopoly of the home-market to the produce of domestic industry, in any particular art or manufacture, is in some measure to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, and must, in almost all cases, be either a useless or a hurtful regulation.