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An instructed and intelligent people are always more decent and orderly than an ignorant and stupid one.

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
Instructed
Orderly
Decent
Ignorant
Intelligent
Stupid
Always
People

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But what all the violence of the feudal institutions could never have effected, the silent and insensible operation of foreign commerce and manufactures gradually brought about.
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Upstart greatness is everywhere less respected than ancient greatness.
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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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With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches.
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All registers which, it is acknowledged, ought to be kept secret, ought certainly never to exist.
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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.
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A true party-man hates and despises candour.
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The problem with fiat money is that it rewards the minority that can handle money, but fools the generation that has worked and saved money.
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Never complain of that of which it is at all times in your power to rid yourself.
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The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education.
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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.
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There is no art which government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.
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In every part of the universe we observe means adjusted with the nicest artifice to the ends which they are intended to produce and in the mechanism of a plant, or animal body, admire how every thing is contrived for advancing the two great purposes of nature, the support of the individual, and the propagation of the species.
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Mercantile jealousy is excited, and both inflames, and is itself inflamed, by the violence of national animosity.
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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.
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Secrets in manufactures are capable of being longer kept than secrets in trade.
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The game women play is men.
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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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Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.
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