Quote

As soon as government management begins it upsets the natural equilibrium of industrial relations, and each interference only requires further bureaucratic control until the end is the tyranny of the totalitarian state.

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
Soon
Industrial
Control
Relations
State
Upset
Natural
Tyranny
Upsets
Ends
Begins
Bureaucratic
States
Requires
Totalitarian
Government
Management
Interference
Relation
Equilibrium

More quotes by Adam Smith

Image
Man, an animal that makes bargains.
Adam Smith
Image
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.
Adam Smith
Image
Now many such things may be done without intitling the people to rise in arms. A gross, flagrant, and palpable abuse no doubt will do it, as if they should be required to pay a tax equal to half or third of their substance.
Adam Smith
Image
The retinue of a grandee in China or Indostan accordingly is, by all accounts, much more numerous and splendid than that of the richest subjects of Europe.
Adam Smith
Image
The learned ignore the evidence of their senses to preserve the coherence of the ideas of their imagination.
Adam Smith
Image
Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality.
Adam Smith
Image
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
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
It is the natural effect of improvement, however, to diminish gradually the real price of almost all manufactures.
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
This is one of those cases in which the imagination is baffled by the facts.
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
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.
Adam Smith
Image
An instructed and intelligent people are always more decent and orderly than an ignorant and stupid one.
Adam Smith
Image
Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.
Adam Smith
Image
I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.
Adam Smith
Image
All jobs are created in direct proportion to the amount of capital employed.
Adam Smith
Image
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
Image
Every faculty in one man is the measure by which he judges of the like faculty in another. I judge of your sight by my sight, of your ear by my ear, of your reason by my reason, of your resentment by my resentment, of your love by my love. I neither have, nor can have, any other way of judging about them.
Adam Smith