Adam Smith Quotes - Page 2

The great secret of education is to direct vanity to proper objects.

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

The game women play is men.

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.

Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.

It must always be remembered, however, that it is the luxuries, and not the necessary expense of the inferior ranks of people, that ought ever to be taxed.

He is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention

An instructed and intelligent people are always more decent and orderly than an ignorant and stupid one.

Every man lives by exchanging.

I have no faith in political arithmetic.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow citizens.

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.

Happiness never lays its finger on its pulse.

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

Defense is superior to opulence.

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.

The violence and injustice of the rulers of mankind is an ancient evil, for which, I am afraid, the nature of human affairs can scarce admit a remedy.

Goods can serve many other purposes besides purchasing money, but money can serve no other purpose besides purchasing goods.

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.

On the road from the City of Skepticism, I had to pass through the Valley of Ambiguity.

Great nations are never impoverished by private, though they sometimes are by public prodigality and misconduct.

Corn is a necessary, silver is only a superfluity.

Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.

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.

But though empires, like all the other works of men, have all hitherto proved mortal, yet every empire aims at immortality.