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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.
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
Property
Extension
Generations
Extensions
Quite
Unnatural
Power
Estates
Fulness
Earth
Posterity
Manifestly
Ever
Belongs
Preceding
Right
Absurd
Dispose
Every
Generation
Bind
More quotes by Adam Smith
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Poor David Hume is dying fast, but with more real cheerfulness and good humor and with more real resignation to the necessary course of things, than any whining Christian ever dyed with pretended resignation to the will of God.
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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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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.
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Men of the most robust make, observe that in looking upon sore eyes they often feel a very sensible soreness in their own, which proceeds from the same reason that organ being in the strongest man more delicate, than any other part of the body is in the weakest.
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I have no faith in political arithmetic.
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On the road from the City of Skepticism, I had to pass through the Valley of Ambiguity.
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But poverty, though it does not prevent the generation, is extremely unfavourable to the rearing of children. The tender plant is produced, but in so cold a soil, and so severe a climate, soon withers and dies.
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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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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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Men desire to have some share in the management of public affairs chiefly on account of the importance which it gives them.
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The ancient Egyptians had a superstitious antipathy to the sea a superstition nearly of the same kind prevails among the Indians and the Chinese have never excelled in foreign commerce.
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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.
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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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It seldom happens, however, that a great proprietor is a great improver.
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I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.
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