Quote

Have lots of experiments, but make sure they're strategically focused.

Adam Smith

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Adam Smith
Age: 67 †
Born: 1723
Born: June 16
Died: 1790
Died: July 17
Economist
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Lang Toun
Lots
Focused
Sure
Make
Strategically
Experiments

More quotes by Adam Smith

Image
An instructed and intelligent people are always more decent and orderly than an ignorant and stupid one.
Adam Smith
Image
The great secret of education is to direct vanity to proper objects.
Adam Smith
Image
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.
Adam Smith
Image
The man scarce lives who is not more credulous than he ought to be... The natural disposition is always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough.
Adam Smith
Image
When the profits of trade happen to be greater than ordinary, over-trading becomes a general error both among great and small dealers.
Adam Smith
Image
The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition is so powerful that it is alone, and without any assistance, capable not only of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting 100 impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations.
Adam Smith
Image
Though the principles of the banking trade may appear somewhat abstruse, the practice is capable of being reduced to strict rules. To depart upon any occasion from those rules, is consequence of some flattering speculation of extraordinary gain, is almost always extremely dangerous, and frequently fatal to the banking company which attempts it.
Adam Smith
Image
Avarice and injustice are always shortsighted, and they did not foresee how much this regulation must obstruct improvement, and thereby hurt in the long-run the real interest of the landlord.
Adam Smith
Image
The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.
Adam Smith
Image
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
Image
Defense is superior to opulence.
Adam Smith
Image
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
Adam Smith
Image
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.
Adam Smith
Image
The cheapness of wine seems to be a cause, not of drunkenness, but of sobriety. ...People are seldom guilty of excess in what is their daily fare... On the contrary, in the countries which, either from excessive heat or cold, produce no grapes, and where wine consequently is dear and a rarity, drunkenness is a common vice.
Adam Smith
Image
Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.
Adam Smith
Image
We are delighted to find a person who values us as we value ourselves, and distinguishes us from the rest of mankind, with an attention not unlike that with which we distinguish ourselves.
Adam Smith
Image
Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expence of carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with with those of the neighbourhood of the town. They are upon that the greatest of all improvements.
Adam Smith
Image
All jobs are created in direct proportion to the amount of capital employed.
Adam Smith
Image
Never complain of that of which it is at all times in your power to rid yourself.
Adam Smith
Image
Whatever work he does, beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance, can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own.
Adam Smith