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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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Adam Smith
Age: 67 †
Born: 1723
Born: June 16
Died: 1790
Died: July 17
Economist
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Lang Toun
Respect
Proper
Complaints
Virtue
Vices
Regarded
Wisdom
Ethics
Admiration
Age
Greatness
Contempt
Moralists
Upon
Weakness
Vice
Unjustly
Often
Objects
Ages
Moralist
Poverty
Dues
Complaint
Wealth
Folly
Bestowed

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The learned ignore the evidence of their senses to preserve the coherence of the ideas of their imagination.
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To hinder, besides, the farmer from selling his goods at all times to the best market, is evidently to sacrifice the ordinary laws of justice to an idea of public utility, to a sort of reasons of state an act of legislative authority which ought to be exercised only, which can be pardoned only in cases of the most urgent necessity.
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In ease of body, peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly upon a level and the beggar who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for.
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The real price of everything, what everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.
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The principle which prompts to save is the desire of bettering our conditiona desire which?comes with us from the womb and never leaves us till we go into the grave.
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Every tax ought to be so 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.
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Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality.
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Problems worthy of attacks, prove their worth by hitting back
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No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.
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A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural.
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The first thing you have to know is yourself. A man who knows himself can step outside himself and watch his own reactions like an observer.
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But though empires, like all the other works of men, have all hitherto proved mortal, yet every empire aims at immortality.
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He is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention
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It is not for its own sake that men desire money, but for the sake of what they can purchase with it.
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When the profits of trade happen to be greater than ordinary, over-trading becomes a general error both among great and small dealers.
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Secrets in manufactures are capable of being longer kept than secrets in trade.
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No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged.
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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.
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Every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of society as great as he can. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. He intends only his own gain, and he is, in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of his intention.
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The world neither ever saw, nor ever will see, a perfectly fair lottery.
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