Authors
Adam Smith Quotes
Best Quotes by Adam Smith (Top 10)
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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.
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Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.
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No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.
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Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.
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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 interest.
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The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.
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Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions.
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The interest of [businessmen] is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public ... The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ... ought never to be adopted, till after having been long and carefully examined ... with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men ... who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public
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Man is an animal that makes bargains: no other animal does this - no dog exchanges bones with another.
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By pursuing his own interest (the individual) frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.
Adam Smith
More Adam Smith Quotes
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Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.
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Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command. It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of the society which he has in view. But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily, leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to society... He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of his intention
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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.
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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.
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Individual Ambition Serves the Common Good.
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On the road from the City of Skepticism, I had to pass through the Valley of Ambiguity.
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A nation is not made wealthy by the childish accumulation of shiny metals, but it enriched by the economic prosperity of it's people.
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The learned ignore the evidence of their senses to preserve the coherence of the ideas of their imagination.
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Labour was the first price, the original purchase - money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased.
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To feel much for others and little for ourselves; to restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections, constitute the perfection of human nature.
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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.
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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.
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What can be added to the happiness of a man who is in health, out of debt, and has a clear conscience?
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With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches.
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Happiness never lays its finger on its pulse.
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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.
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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.
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All money is a matter of belief.
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Humanity is the virtue of a woman, generosity that of a man.
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The real tragedy of the poor is the poverty of their aspirations.
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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.
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The great secret of education is to direct vanity to proper objects.
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Man, an animal that makes bargains.
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To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers, may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers.
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Defense is superior to opulence.
Adam Smith