Adam Smith Quotes

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.

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.

Defense is superior to opulence.

Happiness never lays its finger on its pulse.

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 from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

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.

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

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 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 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.

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 that is governed by shopkeepers.

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