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Secrets in manufactures are capable of being longer kept than secrets in trade.

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
Longer
Secret
Manufactures
Secrets
Kept
Trade
Capable

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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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Justice, however, never was in reality administered gratis in any country. Lawyers and attornies, at least, must always be paid by the parties and, if they were not, they would perform their duty still worse than they actually perform it.
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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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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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In public, as well as in private expences, great wealth may, perhaps, frequently be admitted as an apology for great folly.
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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.
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Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality.
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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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Nothing is more graceful than habitual cheerfulness.
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To feel much for others and little for ourselves, that to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature.
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The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is anywhere directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour.
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Humanity is the virtue of a woman, generosity that of a man.
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The emotions of the spectator will still be very apt to fall short of the violence of what is felt by the sufferer. Mankind, though naturally sympathetic, never conceive, for what has befallen another, that degree of passion which naturally animates the person principally concerned.
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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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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.
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A true party-man hates and despises candour.
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It is unjust that the whole of society should contribute towards an expence of which the benefit is confined to a part of the society.
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I am always willing to run some hazard of being tedious, in order to be sure that I am perspicuous and, after taking the utmost pains that I can to be perspicuous, some obscurity may still appear to remain upon a subject, in its own nature extremely abstracted.
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Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.
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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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