Top 100 Quotes About Adam Smith
#1. The celebrated Adam Smith was the first to point out the immense increase of production, and the superior perfection of products referable to this division of labour.
Jean-Baptiste Say
#2. Thanks to economists, all of us, from the days of Adam Smith and before right down to the present, tariffs are perhaps one tenth of one percent lower than they otherwise would have been. ...
And because of our efforts, we have earned our salaries ten-thousand fold.
Milton Friedman
#3. I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or "incentives" for skill.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#4. Growth theory did not begin with my articles of 1956 and 1957, and it certainly did not end there. Maybe it began with 'The Wealth of Nations'; and probably even Adam Smith had predecessors.
Robert Solow
#5. It was in the eighteenth century that England became what (Adam) Smith called "a nation of shopkeepers" ... (p. 58)
Jerry Z. Muller
#6. Even Adam Smith's "invisible hand" occasionally needs a slap on the wrist.
Bill Mech
#7. I am a believer in Adam Smith, who says that if you look at something that really contributes value to society, and you can deliver it at a reasonable price, then society will recognise that at some point because rational behaviour will come into play.
David Cheriton
#8. Life is full of joys and sorrows, much of it our own making. Sadly, the West has voted time and time again for bigger government, more inflation, higher taxes and excessive regulation - all policies that have kept us from Adam Smith's vision of an opulent society.
Mark Skousen
#9. It is not for nothing that Skaldin in one part of his book quotes Adam Smith: we have seen that both his views and the character of his arguments in many respects repeat the theses of that
great ideologist of the progressive bourgeoisie.
Vladimir Lenin
#10. I do think one success of Northern Europe, which the United States came from, was its willingness to accept innovation in business practices like Adam Smith and the whole Enlightenment. It essentially made the merchant class free instead of controlled by the king and aristocracy. That was essential.
James D. Watson
#11. Adam Smith had one overwhelmingly important triumph: he put into the center of economics the systematic analysis of the behavior of individuals pursuing their self-interest under conditions of competition.
George Stigler
#12. In reality high profits tend much more to raise the price of (a piece of) work than high wages. (quoting Adam Smith - ch.
(III - From Corporatism to Democracy)
John Ralston Saul
#13. It is quite possible that future generations will look upon arguments about the inferiority of the socialist plan as we look upon Adam Smith's argument about joint stock companies which, also, were simply false.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#14. Adam Smith's huge failure was the fact that he did not foresee the industrial revolution.
P. J. O'Rourke
#15. Humans are no less eager than in the past to dominate, degrade, humiliate, and control - often in order to confirm their own sense of pride and superiority. (Adam Smith wrote in 1776 that this was the main motive for slavery.) But
David Brion Davis
#16. During the two centuries since the publication of 'The Wealth of Nations,' the main activity of economists, it seems to me, has been to fill the gaps in Adam Smith's system, to correct his errors and to make his analysis vastly more exact.
Ronald Coase
#17. Adam Smith, and other able writers to whom I have alluded, not having viewed correctly the principles of rent, have, it appears to me, overlooked many important truths, which can only be discovered after the subject of rent is thoroughly understood.
David Ricardo
#18. We don't legislate emergent technologies into existence. We almost never do. They just emerge, dragged forth by Adam Smith's invisible hand. Then we have to see what people are actually going to do with them, and try to legislate to take account of that.
William Gibson
#19. Where are we to look for the consumption required but among the unproductive labourers of Adam Smith? ...
Thomas Malthus
#20. Adam Smith and Malthus and Ricardo ! There is something about these three figures to evoke more than ordinary sentiments from us their children in the spirit.
John Maynard Keynes
#21. Economists must leave to Adam Smith alone the glory of the Quarto, must pluck the day, fling pamphlets into the wind, write always sub specie temporis , and achieve immortality by accident, if at all.
John Maynard Keynes
#22. That invisible hand of Adam Smith's seems to offer an extended middle finger to an awful lot of people.
George Carlin
#23. He is certainly not a good citizen who does not wish to promote, by every means in his power, the welfare of the whole society of his fellow citizens." That is Adam Smith talking, the apostle of laissez-faire.
Charles Murray
#24. Adam Smith pointed out that there were three things that make us more prosperous, in a general sort of way: freedom to pursue our own self-interest; specialization, which he called division of labor; and freedom of trade.
P. J. O'Rourke
#25. The American system of political spending is so unregulated that it might make Adam Smith rethink free markets.
Jon Meacham
#26. These people live in many lands, speak different languages, practice different religions, may even hate one another- yet none of these differences prevented them from cooperating to produce a pencil. How did it happen? Adam Smith gave us the answer two hundred years ago.
Milton Friedman
#27. I protest against deference to any man, whether John Stuart Mill, or Adam Smith, or Aristotle, being allowed to check inquiry. Our science has become far too much a stagnant one, in which opinions rather than experience and reason are appealed to.
William Stanley Jevons
#28. We're supposed to worship Adam Smith but you're not supposed to read him. That's too dangerous.
Noam Chomsky
#29. Adam Smith's key insight was that both parties to an exchange can benefit and that, so long as cooperation is strictly voluntary, no exchange can take place unless both parties do benefit.
Milton Friedman
#30. From Adam Smith's pin factory to Moore's Law of microchips, the division of labor drives the extension of the market, not the other way around. Supply creates its own demand through the proliferation of goods and services down the curves of learning, entropy, and imagination.
George Gilder
#31. It was the mystical dogma of Bentham and Adam Smith and the rest, that some of the worst of human passions would turn out to be all for the best. It was the mysterious doctrine that selfishness would do the work of unselfishness.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#32. What America needs is not Robin Hood but Adam Smith.
Rand Paul
#33. Laissez Faire, laissez passer. Let it be, let it pass. The phrase is not readily translatable. It was widely used by the Physiocrats in urging freedom from government interference and was adopted by Adam Smith.
Francois Quesnay
#34. Conservatives may worship Adam Smith's 'invisible hand,' but for Obama, the helping hand comes in large measure from the public, not the private sector. To call this 'socialism' is to do violence to the word and to the concept. To call it 'un-American' is a smear.
Jeff Greenfield
#35. Adam Smith is misread as being amoral precisely because people don't read his first book, because they don't read 'The Theory of Moral Sentiments.'
P. J. O'Rourke
#36. We should not forget Adam Smith's perspicuous observation that the "masters of mankind" - in his day, the merchants and manufacturers of England - never cease to pursue their "vile maxim": "All for ourselves, and nothing for other people.
Noam Chomsky
#37. Two hundred years ago the first liberal economist, Adam Smith, warned businessmen that they could absorb only a certain amount of rigidity. In the easy days after World War II ... wage rises could be financed out of inflationary price increases.
John Chamberlain
#38. When Adam Smith was being incomprehensible, he didn't have the luxury of brief, snappy technical terms as a shorthand for incoherence.
P. J. O'Rourke
#39. But no moral philosopher, from Aristotle to Aquinas, to John Locke and Adam Smith, divorced economics from a set of moral ends or held the production of wealth to be an end in itself; rather it was seen as a means to the realization of virtue, a means of leading a civilized life.
Daniel Bell
#40. But Adam Smith was a philosopher as well as well as an economist, famous in his time as much for his Theory of Moral Sentiments as for The Wealth of Nations. And as he understood so well, society is more than the sum of its individual parts.
Paul Ormerod
#41. Adam Smith was not a big fan of the pursuit of fame and fortune. His view of what we truly want, of what really makes us happy, cuts to the core of things. It takes him only twelve words to get to the heart of the matter: Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely.
Russ Roberts
#42. As against the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith, there has to be a visible hand of politicians whose objective is to have the kind of society that is caring and humane.
Pierre Trudeau
#43. I debated free trade in college. I came out as a free trader. I'm a free markets guy. I'm an Adam Smith guy.
Sam Wyly
#44. All those who, since Adam Smith, have turned their attention to Political Economy, agree that in reality we do not buy articles of consumption with money, the circulating medium with which we pay for them. We must in the first instance have bought this money itself by the sale of our produce.
Jean-Baptiste Say
#45. Ask me not, 'Are you rightwing,' but ask me 'Are you a committed believer in individual freedom, the values of the enlightenment?' Then, yeah, if being rightwing means believing Adam Smith was right, both in the 'Wealth of Nations' and the 'Theory of Moral Sentiments,' then I'm rightwing.
Niall Ferguson
#46. Modern sociology is virtually an attempt to take up the larger program of social analysis and interpretation which was implicit in Adam Smith's moral philosophy, but which was suppressed for a century by prevailing interest in the technique of the production of wealth.
Albion W. Small
#47. 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
#48. Where does your soul walk? Does it walk in the sunlit woods or hide in the shadowy forest?
Seth Adam Smith
#49. In public, as well as in private expences, great wealth may, perhaps, frequently be admitted as an apology for great folly.
Adam Smith
#50. For each of us, there comes a time when we must awaken and become what we were born to become.
Seth Adam Smith
#51. Have you spent so much time in the darkness that you cannot understand the light?
Seth Adam Smith
#53. Life is difficult and painful, but if you keep moving forward the final destination makes all of the pain worth it.
Seth Adam Smith
#54. 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
#55. The great affair, we always find, is to get money.
Adam Smith
#56. 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
#57. But though empires, like all the other works of men, have all hitherto proved mortal, yet every empire aims at immortality.
Adam Smith
#58. That prevailed before his time. National wealth was measured in terms of a country's stock
Adam Smith
#59. Real love isn't just a euphoric, spontaneous feeling - it's a deliberate choice - a plan to love each other for better and worse, for richer and poorer, in sickness and in health.
Seth Adam Smith
#60. The want of parsimony, in time of peace, imposes the necessity of contracting debt in time of war. When
Adam Smith
#61. Abandon the idea that you will forever be the victim of the things that have happened to you. Choose to be a victor.
Seth Adam Smith
#63. There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.
Adam Smith
#65. No complaint ... is more common than that of a scarcity of money.
Adam Smith
#66. THE WEALTH OF NATIONS is one of the most important and influential books ever written. It
Adam Smith
#67. In general, if any branch of trade, or any division of labour, be advantageous to the public, the freer and more general the competition, it will always be the more so.
Adam Smith
#68. To superficial minds, the vices of the great seem at all times agreeable.
Adam Smith
#69. I have learned that I always feel happier and healthier when I offer genuine love to other people.
Seth Adam Smith
#70. 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
#71. Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.
Adam Smith
#72. 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
#73. Helping someone feel they belong is a magic all its own.
Seth Adam Smith
#74. If you're feeling discouraged and defeated - don't quit. Play on, hope on, and move forward. The music you play - even in the midst of incredible darkness - can and will turn the tide of your own battles.
Seth Adam Smith
#75. The world neither ever saw, nor ever will see, a perfectly fair lottery.
Adam Smith
#76. One day, you will stand at the summit of a figurative mountain and look back on your life's journey. And, to your utter amazement, you will see how your experiences with depression, dark and painful as they were, only added to the overall beauty of your life.
Seth Adam Smith
#77. Thus bound together, they sheltered the child from the cold, dark night, enveloping him in warmth.
Seth Adam Smith
#78. What happens if it doesn't work out, Charli?" he called.
"Then it's not the end, Adam," I replied, barely slowing my walk.
G.J. Walker-Smith
#79. Paradoxically, the more you truly love that person, the more love you receive.
Seth Adam Smith
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 1 person will tell you that you can do it, 100 people will tell you that you can't, and 20 people will tell you that you can do it only with their help. One person is right.
Ryan Adam Smith
#83. Beneficence is always free, it cannot be extorted by force.
Adam Smith
#84. 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
#86. Of their passions in the same object at that particular time.
Adam Smith
#87. The furious behaviour of an angry man is more likely to exasperate us against himself than against his enemies.
Adam Smith
#88. 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
#89. It seldom happens, however, that a great proprietor is a great improver.
Adam Smith
#90. A bruised apple is not all bad. It still has tremendous potential.
Seth Adam Smith
#91. When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble?
Adam Smith
#92. Like small seeds, small deeds can make a big difference.
Seth Adam Smith
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#97. 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
#98. The natural price, therefore, is, as it were, the central price, to which the prices of all commodities are continually gravitating.
Adam Smith
#99. Mortal minds are always unsettled by eternal things; they want to catch the infinite and nail it down to something finite. Impossible!
Seth Adam Smith
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
