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 SMITHIt 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.
More Adam Smith Quotes
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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 -
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 -
No complaint is more common than that of a scarcity of money.
ADAM SMITH -
Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.
ADAM SMITH -
Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.
ADAM SMITH -
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.
ADAM SMITH -
Every tax ought to be so contrived as both to take out and to keep out of the pockets of the people as little as possible, over and above what it brings into the public treasury of the State.
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 -
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 -
Mercantile jealousy is excited, and both inflames, and is itself inflamed, by the violence of national animosity.
ADAM SMITH -
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 -
The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.
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 -
Never complain of that of which it is at all times in your power to rid yourself.
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