Top 100 Adam Smith Quotes
#1. Now many such things may be done without intitling the people to rise in arms. A gross, flagrant, and palpable abuse no doubt will do it, as if they should be required to pay a tax equal to half or third of their substance.
Adam Smith
#2. The great affair, we always find, is to get money.
Adam Smith
#3. The mob, when they are gazing at a dancer on the slack rope, naturally writhe and twist and balance their own bodies, as they see him do.
Adam Smith
#4. The want of parsimony, in time of peace, imposes the necessity of contracting debt in time of war. When
Adam Smith
#5. There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.
Adam Smith
#7. No complaint ... is more common than that of a scarcity of money.
Adam Smith
#8. THE WEALTH OF NATIONS is one of the most important and influential books ever written. It
Adam Smith
#9. To superficial minds, the vices of the great seem at all times agreeable.
Adam Smith
#10. 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
#11. The world neither ever saw, nor ever will see, a perfectly fair lottery.
Adam Smith
#12. When we have read a book or poem so often that we can no longer find any amusement in reading it by ourselves, we can still take pleasure in reading it to a companion. To him it has all the graces of novelty.
Adam Smith
#13. Beneficence is always free, it cannot be extorted by force.
Adam Smith
#14. The rate of profit ... is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin.
Adam Smith
#15. Of their passions in the same object at that particular time.
Adam Smith
#16. The furious behaviour of an angry man is more likely to exasperate us against himself than against his enemies.
Adam Smith
#17. 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
#18. But what all the violence of the feudal institutions could never have effected, the silent and insensible operation of foreign commerce and manufactures gradually brought about.
Adam Smith
#19. 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
#20. The natural price, therefore, is, as it were, the central price, to which the prices of all commodities are continually gravitating.
Adam Smith
#21. 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
#22. The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers.
Adam Smith
#24. An instructed and intelligent people are always more decent and orderly than an ignorant and stupid one.
Adam Smith
#25. Great labour, either of mind or body, continued for several days together is, in most men, naturally followed by a great desire of relaxation, which, if not restrained by force, or by some strong necessity, is almost irresistible.
Adam Smith
#26. Corn is a necessary, silver is only a superfluity.
Adam Smith
#27. Mercantile jealousy is excited, and both inflames, and is itself inflamed, by the violence of national animosity: ...
Adam Smith
#28. An English university is a sanctuary in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices find shelter and protection after they have been . hunted out of every corner of the world.
Adam Smith
#29. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.
Adam Smith
#30. Men desire to have some share in the management of public affairs chiefly on account of the importance which it gives them.
Adam Smith
#31. Labour alone, therefore, never varying in its own value, is alone the ultimate and real standard by which the value of all commodities can at all times and places be estimated and compared. It is their real price; money is their nominal price only.
Adam Smith
#32. Justice, however, never was in reality administered gratis in any country. Lawyers and attornies, at least, must always be paid by the parties; and, if they were not, they would perform their duty still worse than they actually perform it.
Adam Smith
#33. But one half the children born, it is computed, die before the age of manhood.
Adam Smith
#34. 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
#35. The real tragedy of the poor is the poverty of their aspirations.
Adam Smith
#36. Individual Ambition Serves the Common Good.
Adam Smith
#37. I have always considered David Hume as approaching as nearly the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will allow.
Adam Smith
#38. In this consists the difference between the character of a miser and that of a person of exact economy and assiduity. The one is anxious about small matters for their own sake; the other attends to them only in consequence of the scheme of life which he has laid down to himself.
Adam Smith
#39. Secrets in manufactures are capable of being longer kept than secrets in trade.
Adam Smith
#40. Such general complaints of the scarcity of money do not always prove that the usual number of gold and silver pieces are not circulating in the country, but that many people want those pieces who have nothing to give for them.
Adam Smith
#41. 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
#42. In a militia, the character of the laborer, artificer, or tradesman, predominates over that of the soldier: in a standing army, that of the soldier predominates over every other character ...
Adam Smith
#43. After all that has been said of the levity and inconstancy of human nature, it appears evidently from experience, that man is, of all sorts of luggage, the most difficult to be transported.
Adam Smith
#44. Great ambition, the desire of real superiority, of leading and directing, seems to be altogether peculiar to man, and speech is the great instrument of ambition.
Adam Smith
#45. The property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable.
Adam Smith
#46. We are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it.
Adam Smith
#47. To feel much for others and little for ourselves; to restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections, constitute the perfection of human nature.
Adam Smith
#48. 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
#49. On the road from the City of Skepticism, I had to pass through the Valley of Ambiguity.
Adam Smith
#50. 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
#51. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.
Adam Smith
#52. Nothing is more graceful than habitual cheerfulness.
Adam Smith
#53. The division of labour was limited by the extent of the market
Adam Smith
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. Adventure upon all the tickets in the lottery, and you lose for certain; and the greater the number of your tickets the nearer your approach to this certainty.
Adam Smith
#57. The proprietor of stock is necessarily a citizen of the world, and is not necessarily attached to any particular country.
Adam Smith
#58. Upstart greatness is everywhere less respected than ancient greatness.
Adam Smith
#60. What is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.
Adam Smith
#61. 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
#62. Happiness never lays its finger on its pulse.
Adam Smith
#63. 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
#64. The tolls for the maintenance of a high road, cannot with any safety be made the property of private persons.
Adam Smith
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. For a very small expence the public can facilitate, can encourage, and can even impose upon almost the whole body of the people, the necessity of acquiring those most essential parts of education.
Adam Smith
#68. A sketch of a man facing to the right.
Adam Smith
#69. Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love.
Adam Smith
#70. The great secret of education is to direct vanity to proper objects.
Adam Smith
#71. When the profits of trade happen to be greater than ordinary, over-trading becomes a general error both among great and small dealers.
Adam Smith
#72. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.
Adam Smith
#73. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages
Adam Smith
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. The learned ignore the evidence of their senses to preserve the coherence of the ideas of their imagination.
Adam Smith
#77. 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
#78. There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.
Adam Smith
#79. To attempt to increase the wealth of any country, either by introducing or by detaining in it an unnecessary quantity of gold and silver, is as absurd as it would be to attempt to increase the good cheer of private families by obliging them to keep an unnecessary number of kitchen utensils.
Adam Smith
#80. The emotions of the spectator will still be very apt to fall short of the violence of what is felt by the sufferer. Mankind, though naturally sympathetic, never conceive, for what has befallen another, that degree of passion which naturally animates the person principally concerned.
Adam Smith
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. Man is an animal that makes bargains: no other animal does this - no dog exchanges bones with another.
Adam Smith
#84. Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expence of carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with with those of the neighbourhood of the town. They are upon that the greatest of all improvements.
Adam Smith
#85. 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
#86. It is the natural effect of improvement, however, to diminish gradually the real price of almost all manufactures.
Adam Smith
#87. It is not for its own sake that men desire money, but for the sake of what they can purchase with it.
Adam Smith
#88. 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
#89. 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.
Adam Smith
#90. Great nations are never impoverished by private, though they sometimes are by public prodigality and misconduct.
Adam Smith
#91. Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.
Adam Smith
#92. In all the different employments of stock, the ordinary rate of profit varies more or less with the certainty or uncertainty of the returns.
Adam Smith
#93. It is not by augmenting the capital of the country, but by rendering a greater part of that capital active and productive than would otherwise be so, that the most judicious operations of banking can increase the industry of the country.
Adam Smith
#94. 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
#96. Labor was the first price, the original purchase - money that was paid for all things.
Adam Smith
#97. This is one of those cases in which the imagination is baffled by the facts.
Adam Smith
#98. When profit diminishes, merchants are very apt to complain that trade decays; though the diminution of profit is the natural effect of its prosperity, or of a greater stock being employed in it than before.
Adam Smith
#100. The typical worker who through the whole of his life ... pursues the idea of a certain artificial and elegant repose which he may never arrive at, for which he sacrifices a real tranquility ... It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind.
Adam Smith
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