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 SMITHThe proprietor of stock is necessarily a citizen of the world, and is not necessarily attached to any particular country.
More Adam Smith Quotes
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In ease of body, peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly upon a level and the beggar who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for.
ADAM SMITH -
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 -
Corn is a necessary, silver is only a superfluity.
ADAM SMITH -
Goods can serve many other purposes besides purchasing money, but money can serve no other purpose besides purchasing goods.
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Mercantile jealousy is excited, and both inflames, and is itself inflamed, by the violence of national animosity.
ADAM SMITH -
I have no faith in political arithmetic.
ADAM SMITH -
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 -
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 -
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 -
Fear is in almost all cases a wretched instrument of government, and ought in particular never to be employed against any order of men who have the smallest pretensions to independency.
ADAM SMITH -
Defense is superior to opulence.
ADAM SMITH -
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 -
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 -
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 -
Men, like animals, naturally multiply in proportion to the means of their subsistence.
ADAM SMITH -
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 -
I am a beau in nothing but my books.
ADAM SMITH -
A very poor man may be said in some sense to have a demand for a coach and six; he might like to have it; but his demand is not an effectual demand, as the commodity can never be brought to market in order to satisfy it.
ADAM SMITH -
All money is a matter of belief.
ADAM SMITH -
The game women play is men.
ADAM SMITH -
The real price of everything, what everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.
ADAM SMITH -
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 -
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 -
Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.
ADAM SMITH -
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 -
Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.
ADAM SMITH