Adam Smith: Trending quotes (page 5)

“When profit diminishes, merchants are very apt to complain that trade decays; though the diminution of profit is the natural effect of its prosperity, or of a greater stock being employed in it than before.”

Adam Smith

Source: (1776), Book I, Chapter IX

Nature

“When national debts have once been accumulated to a certain degree, there is scarce, I believe, a single instance of their having been fairly and completely paid. The liberation of the public revenue, if it has ever been brought about at all, has always been brought about by bankruptcy; sometimes by an avowed one, but always by a real one, though frequently by a pretend payment.”

Adam Smith

Source: (1776), Book V, Chapter III, Part V, p. 1012.

“Monopoly of one kind or another, indeed, seems to be the sole engine of the mercantile system.”

Adam Smith

Source: (1776), Book IV, Chapter VII, Part Third, p. 684.

“IV. Every tax ought to be contrived as both to take out and to keep out of the pockets of the people as little as possible, over and above what it brings into the public treasury of the state.”

Adam Smith

Source: (1776), Book V, Chapter II, Part II, p. 893.

People

“How many people ruin themselves by laying out money on trinkets of frivolous utility? What pleases these lovers of toys is not so much the utility, as the aptness of the machines which are fitted to promote it. All their pockets are stuffed with little conveniences. They contrive new pockets, unknown in the clothes of other people, in order to carry a greater number. They walk about loaded with a multitude of baubles, in weight and sometimes in value not inferior to an ordinary Jew's-box, some of which may sometimes be of some little use, but all of which might at all times be very well spared, and of which the whole utility is certainly not worth the fatigue of bearing the burden.”

Adam Smith book The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Chap. I.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Part IV

Money , People , Lovers , Time

“There seem, however, to be two cases in which it will generally be advantageous to lay some burden upon foreign, for the encouragement of domestic industry. The first is, when some particular sort of industry is necessary for the defence of the country. The defence of Great Britain, for example, depends very much upon the number of its sailors and shipping. The act of navigation, therefore, very properly endeavours to give the sailors and shipping of Great Britain the monopoly of the trade of their own country, in some cases, by absolute prohibitions, and in others by heavy burdens upon the shipping of foreign countries.”

Adam Smith

Source: (1776), Book IV, Chapter II

Dependency , Country

“With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which in their eye is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves.”

Adam Smith

Source: (1776), Book I, Chapter XI, Part II, p. 202 (See also Thorstein Veblen).

People , Decision , Appearance , Parting

“There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not, in this respect, possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving. Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind, than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the jails of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor of those which they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished.”

Adam Smith book The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Chap. II.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Part V

Soul , Country

“This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and powerful, and to despise or, at least, neglect persons of poor and mean conditions, 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 book The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Section III, Chap. II.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Part I

Universe , Time , Personality

“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.”

Adam Smith

Source: (1776), Book I, Chapter VI, p. 60.

Love , Men , Nature , Country

“The poverty of the lower ranks of people in China far surpasses that of the most beggarly nations of Europe. In the neighbourhood of Canton many hundred, it is commonly said, many thousand families have no habitation on the land, but live constantly in little fishing boats upon the rivers and the canals. The subsistence which they find there is so scanty that they are eager to fish up the nastiest garbage thrown overboard from any European ship. Any carrion, the carcase of a dead dog or cat, for example, though half putrid and stinking, is as welcome to them as the most wholesome food to the people of other countries.”

Adam Smith

Source: (1776), Book I, Chapter VIII, p. 86.

People , Family , Food , Dogs

“It is not for its own sake that men desire money, but for the sake of what they can purchase with it.”

Adam Smith

Source: (1776), Book IV, Chapter I, p. 471.

Men , Money

“The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.”

Adam Smith book The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Section II, Chap. II.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Part VI

Beauty , Imagination , Game , Strong

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

Adam Smith

Source: (1776), Book IV, Chapter VII, Part Second, p. 619.

Country

“It cannot be very difficult to determine who have been the contrivers of this whole mercantile system; not the consumers, we may believe, whose interest has been entirely neglected; but the producers, whose interests has been so carefully attended to; and among this later class our merchants and manufactures have been by far the principal architects. In the mercantile regulations, which have been taken notice of in this chapter, the interest of our manufacturers has been most peculiarly attended to; and the interest, not so much of the consumers, as that of some other sets of producers, has been sacrificed to it.”

Adam Smith

Source: The Wealth of Nations (1776), Book IV, Chapter VIII, p. 721.

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

Adam Smith

Source: (1776), Book I, Chapter I, p. 7

Parting

“In every country it always is and must be the interest of the great body of the people to buy whatever they want of those who sell it cheapest. The proposition is so very manifest that it seems ridiculous to take any pains to prove it; nor could it ever have been called in question had not the interested sophistry of merchants and manufacturers confounded the common sense of mankind. Their interest is, in this respect, directly opposite to that of the great body of the people.”

Adam Smith

Source: (1776), Book IV, Chapter III, Part II, p. 531.

Pain , People , Question , Sense

“III. Every tax ought to be levied at the time, or in the manner, in which it is most likely to be convenient for the contributor to pay it.”

Adam Smith

Source: (1776), Book V, Chapter II Part II, p. 893.

Time

“To give the monopoly of the home-market to the produce of domestic industry, in any particular art or manufacture, is in some measure to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, and must, in almost all cases, be either a useless or a hurtful regulation.”

Adam Smith

Source: (1776), Book IV, Chapter II, p. 489.

People , Art , Home , Hurt

“The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education.”

Adam Smith

Source: (1776), Book I, Chapter II, p. 17.

Education , Nature