Adam Smith Quotes
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As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.
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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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Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.
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It seldom happens, however, that a great proprietor is a great improver.
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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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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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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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Corn is a necessary, silver is only a superfluity.
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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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Mercantile jealousy is excited, and both inflames, and is itself inflamed, by the violence of national animosity:...
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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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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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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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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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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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China is a much richer country than any part of Europe.
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Secrets in manufactures are capable of being longer kept than secrets in trade.
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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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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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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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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.
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The man who esteems himself as he ought, and no more than he ought, seldom fails to obtain from other people all the esteem that he himself thinks due. He desires no more than is due to him, and he rests upon it with complete satisfaction.
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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.