Famous Quotes & Sayings

Adam Smith Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Adam Smith.

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Famous Quotes By Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1192631

An instructed and intelligent people are always more decent and orderly than an ignorant and stupid one. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 210964

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. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1352720

Virtue is excellence, something uncommonly great and beautiful, which rises far above what is vulgar and ordinary. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1665605

The robot is going to lose. Not by much. But when the final score is tallied, flesh and blood is going to beat the damn monster. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 631408

There is a great deal of ruin in a nation. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 841296

The problem with fiat money is that it rewards the minority that can handle money, but fools the generation that has worked and saved money. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1727071

The desire of food is limited in every man by the narrow capacity of the human stomach; but the desire of the conveniencies and ornaments of building, dress, equipage, and household furniture, seems to have no limit or certain boundary. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 241929

And a workman, even of the lowest and poorest order, if he is frugal and industrious, may enjoy a greater share of the necessaries and conveniences of life than it is possible for any savage to acquire. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 325871

The difference between the genius of the British constitution, which protects and governs North America, and that of the mercantile company which oppresses and domineers in the East Indies, cannot, perhaps, be better illustrated than by the different state of those countries. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 2196929

Goods can serve many other purposes besides purchasing money, but money can serve no other purpose besides purchasing goods. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 958101

Men of the most robust make, observe that in looking upon sore eyes they often feel a very sensible soreness in their own, which proceeds from the same reason; that organ being in the strongest man more delicate, than any other part of the body is in the weakest. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1146849

A gardener who cultivates his own garden with his own hands, unites in his own person the three different characters, of landlord, farmer, and labourer. His produce, therefore, should pay him the rent of the first, the profit of the second, and the wages of the third. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1099211

The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniencies of life which it annually consumes, and which consist always either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1466881

The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition, when suffered to exert itself with freedom and security, is so powerful a principle, that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1652214

The real and effectual discipline which is exercised over a workman is that of his customers. It is the fear of losing their employment which restrains his frauds and corrects his negligence. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 85132

Men desire to have some share in the management of public affairs chiefly on account of the importance which it gives them. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1375444

I have no faith in political arithmetic. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1405855

...a man within the breast... — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1726551

Public services are never better performed than when their reward comes only in consequence of their being performed, and is proportioned to the diligence employed in performing them. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1679008

The tolls for the maintenance of a high road, cannot with any safety be made the property of private persons. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1411666

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

Adam Smith Quotes 1666227

I am a beau only in my books. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 2252051

Are you in earnest resolved never to barter your liberty for the lordly servitude of a court, but to live free, fearless, and independent? There seems to be one way to continue in that virtuous resolution; and perhaps but one. Never enter the place from whence so few have been able to return; never come within the circle of ambition; nor ever bring yourself into comparison with those masters of the earth who have already engrossed the attention of half mankind before you. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1655735

Secrets in manufactures are capable of being longer kept than secrets in trade. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1423226

The ancient Egyptians had a superstitious antipathy to the sea; a superstition nearly of the same kind prevails among the Indians; and the Chinese have never excelled in foreign commerce. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1593811

No complaint ... is more common than that of a scarcity of money. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1585639

History may not repeat itself," in Mark Twain's wise formulation, "but it rhymes. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1550806

The division of labour was limited by the extent of the market — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1784233

But one half the children born, it is computed, die before the age of manhood. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1465015

But they are commonly more distinguished by their superiority in the latter than in the former. Their — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 2258804

What is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1426928

The cheapness of wine seems to be a cause, not of drunkenness, but of sobriety ... People are seldom guilty of excess in what is their daily fare ... On the contrary, in the countries which, either from excessive heat or cold, produce no grapes, and where wine consequently is dear and a rarity, drunkenness is a common vice. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 2078483

Wonder ... and not any expectation of advantage from its discoveries, is the first principle which prompts mankind to the study of Philosophy, of that science which pretends to lay open the concealed connections that unite the various appearances of nature. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 2240613

To prohibit a great people, however, from making all that they can of every part of their own produce, or from employing their stock and industry in the way that they judge most advantageous to themselves, is a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 2219382

The principle which prompts to save is the desire of bettering our conditiona desire which?comes with us from the womb and never leaves us till we go into the grave. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 2202481

The first thing you have to know is yourself. A man who knows himself can step outside himself and watch his own reactions like an observer. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 2194352

A highway, a bridge, a navigable canal, for example, may in most cases be both made and maintained by a small toll upon the carriages which make use of them: a harbour, by moderate port-duty upon the tonnage of the shipping which load or unload in it. The coinage, another institution for facilitating commerce, in many countries, not only defrays its own expense, but affords a small revenue or seignorage to the sovereign. The post-office, another institution for the same purpose, over and above defraying its own expense, affords in almost all countries a very considerable revenue to the sovereign.
When the carriages which pass over a highway or a bridge, and the lighters which sail upon a navigable canal, pay toll in proportion to their weight or their tonnage, they pay for the maintenance of those public works exactly in proportion to the wear and tear which they occasion of them. It seems scarce possible to invent a more equitable way of maintaining such works. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 2188697

A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 2169152

But the value of silver, though it sometimes varies greatly from century to century, seldom varies much from year to year, but frequently continues the same, or very nearly the same, for half a century or a century together. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 2163806

Problems worthy of attacks, prove their worth by hitting back — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 2151552

If there is any society
among robbers and murderers, they must at least ... abstain
from robbing and murdering one another. So beneficence
is less essential than justice is to the existence of society; a
lack of beneficence will make a society uncomfortable, but
the prevalence of injustice will utterly destroy it. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 2144944

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. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 2110493

Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power. But the person who either acquires, or succeeds to a great fortune, does not necessarily acquire or succeed to any political power, either civil or military. His fortune may, perhaps, afford him the means of acquiring both; but the mere possession of that fortune does not necessarily convey to him either. The power which that possession immediately and directly conveys to him, is the power of purchasing a certain command over all the labour, or over all the produce of labour which is then in the market. His fortune is greater or less, precisely in proportion to the extent of this power, or to the quantity either of other men's labour, or, what is the same thing, of the produce of other men's labour, which it enables him to purchase or command. The exchangeable value of every thing must always be precisely equal to the extent of this power which it conveys to its owner. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 2102485

Every tax, however, is to the person who pays it a badge, not of slavery but of liberty. It denotes that he is a subject to government, indeed, but that, as he has some property, he cannot himself be the property of a master. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1761078

In public, as well as in private expences, great wealth may, perhaps, frequently be admitted as an apology for great folly. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1998383

No society can surely be flourishing and happy of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1986227

Upstart greatness is everywhere less respected than ancient greatness. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1913883

I have no great faith in political arithmetic, and I mean not to warrant the exactness of either of these computations. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1883616

Whatever work he does, beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance, can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1862608

The man of system ... is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it ... He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1848353

In a nation distracted by faction, there are, no doubt, always a few, though commonly but a very few, who preserve their judgment untainted by the general contagion. They seldom amount to more than, here and there, a solitary individual, without any influence, excluded, by his own candour, from the confidence of either party, and who, though he may be one of the wisest, is necessarily, upon that very account, one of the most insignificant men in the society. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1830991

As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 2264681

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1815281

The revenues of the ancient Saxon kings of England are said to have been paid, not in money, but in kind, that is, in victuals and provisions of all sorts. William the Conqueror introduced the custom of paying them in money. This money, however, was for a long time, received at the exchequer, by weight, and not by tale. The inconveniency and difficulty of weighing those metals with exactness, gave occasion to the institution of coins, of which the stamp, covering entirely both sides of the piece, and sometimes the edges too, was supposed to ascertain not only the fineness, but the weight of the metal. Such coins, therefore, were received by tale, as at present, without the trouble of weighing. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1813466

Education in the ingenious arts and in the liberal professions is still more tedious and expensive. The pecuniary recompense, therefore, of painters and sculptors, of lawyers and physicians, ought to be much more liberal; and it is so accordingly. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 337307

The man scarce lives who is not more credulous than he ought to be ... The natural disposition is always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 559731

Sugar, rum and tobacco are commodities which are nowhere necessaries of life, which are become objects of almost universal consumption, and which are therefore extremely proper subjects of taxation. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 553053

No society can flourish of which the greater part is poor and miserable — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 550349

Labor was the first price, the original purchase - money that was paid for all things. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 510213

Under capitalism the more money you have, the easier it is to make money, and the less money you have, the harder.Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. The affluence of the rich supposes the indigence of the many. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 505628

A monopoly granted either to an individual or to a trading company has the same effect as a secret in trade or manufactures. The monopolists, by keeping the market constantly understocked, by never fully supplying the effectual demand, sell their commodities much above the natural price, and raise their emoluments, whether they consist in wages or profit, greatly above their natural rate. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 462851

Such regulations may, no doubt, be considered as in some respect a violation of natural liberty. But those exertions of the natural liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the whole society, are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all governments; of the most free, as well as or the most despotical. The obligation of building party walls, in order to prevent the communication of fire, is a violation of natural liberty, exactly of the same kind with the regulations of the banking trade which are here proposed. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 457397

It may indeed be doubted whether butchers' meet is anywhere 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, afford the most plentiful, the most wholesome, the most nourishing, and the most invigorating diet. Decency nowhere requires that any man should eat butchers' meat. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 446244

In all governments accordingly, even in monarchies, the highest offices are generally possessed, and the whole detail of the administration conducted, by men who were educated in the middle and inferior ranks of life, who have been carried forward by their own industry and abilities, though loaded with the jealousy, and opposed by the resentment, of all those who were born their superiors, and to whom the great, after having regarded them first with contempt, and afterwards with envy, are at last contented to truckle with the same abject meanness with which they desire that the rest of mankind should behave to themselves. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 426605

The State (meaning the gov't and society) derives no inconsiderable advantage from the peoples instruction (in other words, education). The more they are instructed, the less liable they are to the delusions of enthusiasm and superstition.
...
The expense of the institutions for education and religious instruction, is likewise, no doubt, beneficial to the whole society, and may, therefore, without injustice, be defrayed by the general contribution of society. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 361204

All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 356977

The first duty of the sovereign [is] that of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies, [which] can be performed only by means of a military force — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 583684

The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 336685

Man is an animal that makes bargains: no other animal does this - no dog exchanges bones with another. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 313436

Never complain of that of which it is at all times in your power to rid yourself. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 310042

To superficial minds, the vices of the great seem at all times agreeable. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 300305

To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers, may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 298422

Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 280353

Both ground- rents and the ordinary rent of land are a species of revenue which the owner, in many cases, enjoys without any care or attention of his own. The annual produce of the land and labour of the society, the real wealth and revenue of the great body of the people, might be the same after such a tax as before. Ground-rents, and the ordinary rent of land are, therefore, perhaps the species of revenue which can best bear to have a peculiar tax imposed upon them. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 258323

The importation of gold and silver is not the principal, much less the sole benefit which a nation derives from its foreign trade. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 206545

The uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition ... is frequently powerful enough to maintain the natural progress of things toward improvement, in spite of the extravagance of government, and of the greatest errors of administration. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 164237

To expect, indeed, that the freedom of trade should ever be entirely restored in Great Britain, is as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia should never be established in it. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 85931

As soon as government management begins it upsets the natural equilibrium of industrial relations, and each interference only requires further bureaucratic control until the end is the tyranny of the totalitarian state. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1060953

How many people ruin themselves by laying out money on trinkets of frivolous utility? What pleases these lovers of toys is not so much the utility, as the aptness of the machines which are fitted to promote it. All their pockets are stuffed with little conveniences. They contrive new pockets, unknown in the clothes of other people, in order to carry a greater number. They walk about loaded with a multitude of baubles, in weight and sometimes in value not inferior to an ordinary Jew's-box, some of which may sometimes be of some little use, but all of which might at all times be very well spared, and of which the whole utility is certainly not worth the fatigue of bearing the burden. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1275140

A sketch of a man facing to the right. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1241050

The proprietor of stock is necessarily a citizen of the world, and is not necessarily attached to any particular country. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1211294

It would be too ridiculous to go about seriously to prove that wealth does not consist in money, or in gold and silver; but in what money purchases, and is valuable only for purchasing. Money no doubt, makes always a part of the national capital; but it has already been shown that it generally makes but a small part, and always the most unprofitable part of it. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1172251

Ask any rich man of common prudence to which of the two sorts of people he has lent the greater part of his stock, to those who, he thinks, will employ it profitably, or to those who will spend it idly, and he will laugh at you for proposing the question. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1163559

It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense. They are themselves, always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1116388

The theory that can absorb the greatest number of facts, and persist in doing so, generation after generation, through all changes of opinion and detail, is the one that must rule all observation. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1107156

What can be added to the happiness of a man who is in health, out of debt, and has a clear conscience? — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1084511

All jobs are created in direct proportion to the amount of capital employed. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1067568

In the common degree of the moral, there is no virtue. Virtue is excellence. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1067557

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1324122

The great secret of education is to direct vanity to proper objects. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1046547

I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1044810

Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 1040671

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. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 906660

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 902987

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

Adam Smith Quotes 840645

The profligacy of a man of fashion is looked upon with much less contempt and aversion, than that of a man of meaner condition. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 819471

Individual Ambition Serves the Common Good. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 779984

Resentment seems to have been given us by nature for a defense, and for a defense only! It is the safeguard of justice and the security of innocence. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 732143

The poor man's son, whom heaven has in its anger visited with ambition, goes beyong admiration of palaces to envy. He labours all his life to outdo his competitors, only to find the end that the rich are no happier than the poor in the things that really matter. — Adam Smith

Adam Smith Quotes 710299

On the road from the City of Skepticism, I had to pass through the Valley of Ambiguity. — Adam Smith