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

Adam Smith

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Adam Smith
Age: 67 †
Born: 1723
Born: June 16
Died: 1790
Died: July 17
Economist
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Lang Toun
Economy
Excess
Fear
Vice
Vices
Economics
Subject
Conscience
Excesses
Subjects
Feared
Virtue
Regulation

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The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities.
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In general, if any branch of trade, or any division of labour, be advantageous to the public, the freer and more general the competition, it will always be the more so.
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Goods can serve many other purposes besides purchasing money, but money can serve no other purpose besides purchasing goods.
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Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.
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Though the profusion of Government must undoubtedly have retarded the natural progress of England to wealth and improvement, it has not been able to stop it.
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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.
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Capitals are increased by parsimony, and diminished by prodigalityand misconduct. By what a frugal man annually saves he not onlyaffords maintenance to an additional number of productive hands?but?he establishes as it were a perpetual fund for the maintenance of an equal number in all times to come.
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Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.
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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.
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The liberal reward of labour, therefore, as it is the affect of increasing wealth, so it is the cause of increasing population. To complain of it, is to lament over the necessary effect and cause of the greatest public prosperity.
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It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.
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The property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable.
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It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense. They are themselves, always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society.
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Men desire to have some share in the management of public affairs chiefly on account of the importance which it gives them.
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The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniencies of life which it annually consumes, and which consist always either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations.
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No complaint... is more common than that of a scarcity of money.
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I have no great faith in political arithmetic, and I mean not to warrant the exactness of either of these computations.
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The rate of profit... is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin.
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All money is a matter of belief.
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In the long-run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him, but the necessity is not so immediate.
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