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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.
Adam Smith -
It is not for its own sake that men desire money, but for the sake of what they can purchase with it.
Adam Smith
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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.
Adam Smith -
There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.
Adam Smith -
It seldom happens, however, that a great proprietor is a great improver.
Adam Smith -
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.
Adam Smith -
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.
Adam Smith -
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.
Adam Smith
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China is a much richer country than any part of Europe.
Adam Smith -
We are delighted to find a person who values us as we value ourselves, and distinguishes us from the rest of mankind, with an attention not unlike that with which we distinguish ourselves.
Adam Smith -
By nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from a street porter, as a mastiff is from a greyhound,
Adam Smith -
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.
Adam Smith -
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.
Adam Smith -
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.
Adam Smith
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Mercantile jealousy is excited, and both inflames, and is itself inflamed, by the violence of national animosity:...
Adam Smith -
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.
Adam Smith -
Secrets in manufactures are capable of being longer kept than secrets in trade.
Adam Smith -
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.
Adam Smith -
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.
Adam Smith -
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.
Adam Smith
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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.
Adam Smith -
Corn is a necessary, silver is only a superfluity.
Adam Smith -
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.
Adam Smith -
Marriage is encouraged in China, not by the profitableness of children, but by the liberty of destroying them.
Adam Smith