Top 250 Adam Smith Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Wages, profit, and rent, are the three original sources of all revenue, as well as of all exchangeable value. All other revenue is ultimately derived from someone or other of these.”

— Adam Smith

102. “It 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.”

— Adam Smith

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

— Adam Smith

104. “By nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from a street porter, as a mastiff is from a greyhound.”

— Adam Smith

105. “I am always willing to run some hazard of being tedious, in order to be sure that I am perspicuous; and, after taking the utmost pains that I can to be perspicuous, some obscurity may still appear to remain upon a subject, in its own nature extremely abstracted.”

— Adam Smith

106. “Beneficence is always free, it cannot be extorted by force.”

— Adam Smith

107. “Men of the most robust make, observe that in looking upon sore eyes they often feel a very sensible soreness in their own, which proceeds from the same reason; that organ being in the strongest man more delicate, than any other part of the body is in the weakest.”

— Adam Smith

108. “Great ambition, the desire of real superiority, of leading and directing, seems to be altogether peculiar to man, and speech is the great instrument of ambition.”

— Adam Smith

109. “As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation.”

— Adam Smith

110. “Men, like animals, naturally multiply in proportion to the means of their subsistence.”

— Adam Smith

111. “Labour alone, therefore, never varying in its own value, is alone the ultimate and real standard by which the value of all commodities can at all times and places be estimated and compared. It is their real price; money is their nominal price only.”

— Adam Smith

112. “I am a beau only in my books.”

— Adam Smith

113. “In this consists the difference between the character of a miser and that of a person of exact economy and assiduity. The one is anxious about small matters for their own sake; the other attends to them only in consequence of the scheme of life which he has laid down to himself.”

— Adam Smith

114. “In the long-run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him, but the necessity is not so immediate.”

— Adam Smith

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

— Adam Smith

116. “Whatever work he does, beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance, can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own.”

— Adam Smith

117. “A merchant, it has been said very properly, is not necessarily the citizen of any particular country.”

— Adam Smith

118. “It seldom happens, however, that a great proprietor is a great improver.”

— Adam Smith

119. “Mercantile jealousy is excited, and both inflames, and is itself inflamed, by the violence of national animosity:...”

— Adam Smith

120. “Poor David Hume is dying fast, but with more real cheerfulness and good humor and with more real resignation to the necessary course of things, than any whining Christian ever dyed with pretended resignation to the will of God.”

— Adam Smith

121. “The wages of labour are the encouragement of industry, which, like every other human quality, improves in proportion to the encouragement it receives.”

— Adam Smith

122. “We are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it.”

— Adam Smith

123. “With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches.”

— Adam Smith

124. “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.”

— Adam Smith

125. “This 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, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”

— Adam Smith

126. “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

127. “I am always willing to run some hazard of being tedious, in order to be sure that I am perspicuous.”

— Adam Smith

128. “The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniencies of life which it annually consumes, and which consist always either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations.”

— Adam Smith

129. “The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities.”

— Adam Smith

130. “In public, as well as in private expences, great wealth may, perhaps, frequently be admitted as an apology for great folly.”

— Adam Smith

131. “Education in the ingenious arts and in the liberal professions is still more tedious and expensive. The pecuniary recompense, therefore, of painters and sculptors, of lawyers and physicians, ought to be much more liberal; and it is so accordingly.”

— Adam Smith

132. “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.”

— Adam Smith

133. “It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased;.”

— Adam Smith

134. “Nothing is more graceful than habitual cheerfulness.”

— Adam Smith

135. “The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is anywhere directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour.”

— Adam Smith

136. “Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor.”

— Adam Smith

137. “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

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

— Adam Smith

139. “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

140. “It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”

— Adam Smith

141. “Every species of animals naturally multiplies in proportion to the means of their subsistence, and no species can ever multiply beyond it. But in civilised society it is only among the inferior ranks of people that the scantiness of subsistence can set limits to the further multiplication of the human species; and it can do so in no other way than by destroying a great part of the children which their fruitful marriages produce.”

— Adam Smith

142. “In every improved society, the farmer is generally nothing but a farmer; the manufacturer, nothing but a manufacturer. The labour, too, which is necessary to produce any one complete manufacture is almost always divided among a great number of hands. How many different trades are employed in each branch of the linen and woollen manufactures from the growers of the flax and the wool, to the bleachers and smoothers of the linen, or to the dyers and dressers of the cloth!”

— Adam Smith

143. “In a militia, the character of the laborer, artificer, or tradesman, predominates over that of the soldier: in a standing army, that of the soldier predominates over every other character...”

— Adam Smith

144. “We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject.”

— Adam Smith

145. “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

146. “Though the profusion of Government must undoubtedly have retarded the natural progress of England to wealth and improvement, it has not been able to stop it.”

— Adam Smith

147. “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.”

— Adam Smith

148. “To expect, indeed, that the freedom of trade should ever be entirely restored in Great Britain, is as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia should never be established in it.”

— Adam Smith

149. “The world neither ever saw, nor ever will see, a perfectly fair lottery.”

— Adam Smith

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

— Adam Smith