Adam Smith Quotes
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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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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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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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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 value which the workmen add to the materials, therefore, resolves itself in this case into two parts, of which the one pays their wages, the other the profits of the employer upon the whole stock of materials and wages which he advanced.
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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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A merchant, it has been said very properly, is not necessarily the citizen of any particular country.
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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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Upstart greatness is everywhere less respected than ancient greatness.
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In public, as well as in private expences, great wealth may, perhaps, frequently be admitted as an apology for great folly.
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Secrets in manufactures are capable of being longer kept than secrets in trade.
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The virtue of frugality lies in a middle between avarice and profusion, of which the one consists in an excess, the other in a defect of the proper attention to the objects of self–interest.
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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.
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The evident justice and utility of the foregoing maxims have recommended them more or less to the attention of all nations.
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Though the principles of the banking trade may appear somewhat abstruse, the practice is capable of being reduced to strict rules. To depart upon any occasion from these rules, in consequence of some flattering speculation of extraordinary gain, is almost always extremely dangerous, and frequently fatal to the banking company which attempts it.
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Nothing but the most exemplary morals can give dignity to a man of small fortune.
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All registers which, it is acknowledged, ought to be kept secret, ought certainly never to exist.
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I. The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities, that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.