Adam Smith
Adam Smith
Adam Smith– 17 July 1790) was a Scottish moral philosopher, pioneer of political economy, and a key figure in the Scottish Enlightenment...
NationalityScottish
ProfessionEconomist
Date of Birth5 June 1723
change numbers generations
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.
real ambition men
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.
ignorance imagination baffled
This is one of those cases in which the imagination is baffled by the facts.
labour-movement labor-day firsts
Labor was the first price, the original purchase - money that was paid for all things.
travel business adventure
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.
patriotic government libertarian
Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.
affluence economics inequality
Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality.
organization ignorant world
We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations [that is, unions or colluding organizations] 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. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual price.
differences favors regulation
Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters.
hands maintenance rewards
The liberal reward of labor, therefore, as it is the necessary effect, so it is the natural symptom of increasing national wealth. The scanty maintenance of the laboring poor, on the other hand, is the natural symptom that things are at a stand, and their starving condition that they going backwards fast.
wise men economic-order
The man of system is apt to be very wise in his own conceit. 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
uniforms wages economics
Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor.
mean men animal
Men, like animals, naturally multiply in proportion to the means of their subsistence.
ignorance hands invisible-hand
He is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention