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This is one of those cases in which the imagination is baffled by the facts.

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
Facts
Baffled
Economics
Ignorance
Cases
Economy
Imagination

More quotes by Adam Smith

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As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation.
Adam Smith
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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.
Adam Smith
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The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers.
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The mob, when they are gazing at a dancer on the slack rope, naturally writhe and twist and balance their own bodies, as they see him do.
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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.
Adam Smith
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Every man lives by exchanging.
Adam Smith
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Justice, however, never was in reality administered gratis in any country. Lawyers and attornies, at least, must always be paid by the parties and, if they were not, they would perform their duty still worse than they actually perform it.
Adam Smith
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A nation is not made wealthy by the childish accumulation of shiny metals, but it enriched by the economic prosperity of it's people.
Adam Smith
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That a joint stock company should be able to carry on successfully any branch of foreign trade, when private adventurers can come into any sort of open and fair competition with them, seems contrary to all experience.
Adam Smith
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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.
Adam Smith
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To expect, indeed, that the freedom of trade should ever be entirely restored in Great Britain, is as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia should never be established in it.
Adam Smith
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The great affair, we always find, is to get money.
Adam Smith
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Problems worthy of attacks, prove their worth by hitting back
Adam Smith
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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.
Adam Smith
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The great secret of education is to direct vanity to proper objects.
Adam Smith
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I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.
Adam Smith
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Fear is in almost all cases a wretched instrument of government, and ought in particular never to be employed against any order of men who have the smallest pretensions to independency.
Adam Smith
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It appears, accordingly, from the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves.
Adam Smith
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That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is most often unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages.
Adam Smith
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Wonder... and not any expectation of advantage from its discoveries, is the first principle which prompts mankind to the study of Philosophy, of that science which pretends to lay open the concealed connections that unite the various appearances of nature.
Adam Smith