The quotations are arranged by author name. Current counts: Authors: 8,146. Quotations: 38,970 Select the first character of the author's last name that you want to look at: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

---

Adam Smith

b: Kirkcady, Scotland., Jun 5, 1723

d: Edinburgh, Scotland., Jul 17, 1790

Scottish. Economist. Laid foundation for clasical economics with An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776.

---

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.

All money is a matter of belief.

As soon as government management begins it upsets the natural equilibrium of industrial relations, and each interference only requires further bureaucratic control until the end is the tyranny of the totalitarian state.

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.

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. Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations.

Defense is superior to opulence.

Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest in his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men.

Happiness never lays its finger on its pulse.

Have the exorbitant profits of the merchants of Cadiz and Lisbon augmented the capital of Spain and Portugal? Have they alleviated the poverty, have they promoted the industries of those two beggarly countries?

Humanity is the virtue of a woman, generosity that of a man.

I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.

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.

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.

It is the maxim of every prudent master of a family never to make at home what it will cost him more to make than to buy.

It was not by gold or by silver, but by labor, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased.

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.

Man is an animal that makes bargains: no other animal does this – no dog exchanges bones with another.

Mankind are animals that makes bargains, no other animal does this.

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.

Nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that yours: I am willing to give this for that.

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

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.

Resentment seems to have been given us by nature for a defense, and for a defense only! It is the safeguard of justice and the security of innocence.

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.

The government of an exclusive company of merchants is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatever.

The machines that are first invented to perform any particular movement are always the most complex, and succeeding artists generally discover that, with fewer wheels the same effects may be more easily produced.

The mind is so rarely disturbed, but that the company of friend will restore it to some degree of tranquility and sedateness.

The objects of avarice and ambition differ only in their greatness. A miser is as furious about a halfpenny as the man of ambition about the conquest of a kingdom.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is one of those cases in which the imagination is baffled by the facts.

Those exertions of the natural liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the whole society, are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all governments.

To feel much for others and little for ourselves; to restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections, constitute the perfection of human nature.

To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a nation of shopkeepers, 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.

Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.

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

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

With the great part of rich people, the chief employment of riches consists in the parade of riches.