“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.”

The propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Every man is rich or poor according to the degree in which he can afford to enjoy the necessaries, conveniences, and amusements of human life.

Have lots of experiments, but make sure they’re strategically focused.

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

Man, an animal that makes bargains.

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.

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.

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.

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.

The division of labour was limited by the extent of the market.

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

Asceticism is the trifling of an enthusiast with his power, a puerile coquetting with his selfishness or his vanity, in the absence of any sufficiently great object to employ the first or overcome the last.

This idea that the employment of women, the movement of women outside the home into the work world, and their demand for equality is somehow responsible for increasing juvenile delinquency or the increase in divorce rate, is just so much bullshit.

If God himself was not willing to use coercion to force man to accept certain religious views, man, uninspired and liable to error, ought not to use the means that Jehovah would not employ.

Hundreds of millions of human beings on our planet increasingly suffer from unemployment, poverty, hunger, and the destruction of their families.

No country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources. Demoralization caused by vast unemployment is our greatest extravagance. Morally, it is the greatest menace to our social order.

See yourself as self employed.

If we want to invest in the prosperity of our nation, we must invest in the education of our children so that their talents may be fully employed.

It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.