Quotes from Adam Smith

All money is a matter of belief.

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

In China, often only the practice of infanticide makes marriage and family life possible.  In all the major towns, parents annually abandon many children in the streets or drown them like unwanted puppies.  Some people even make a living out of performing infanticide contracts for money.

The real price of everything is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.

Free circulation of labour is the foundation of any free trade system.

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

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

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

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.

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

Sugar, rum and tobacco are commodities which are nowhere necessaries of life, which are become objects of almost universal consumption, and which are therefore extremely proper subjects of taxation.

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

That the chance of gain is naturally over-valued, we may learn from the universal success of lotteries.

Happiness never lays its finger on its pulse.

Labor was the first price, the original purchase - money that was paid for all things.

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.

Never complain of that of which it is at all times in your power to rid yourself.

The real and effectual discipline which is exercised over a workman is that of his customers. It is the fear of losing their employment which restrains his frauds and corrects his negligence.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.