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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.

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
Part
Whole
Confined
Contribute
Unjust
Benefit
Towards
Benefits
Society

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Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.
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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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No complaint... is more common than that of a scarcity of money.
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Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production.
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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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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.
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All registers which, it is acknowledged, ought to be kept secret, ought certainly never to exist.
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To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers, may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers.
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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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Men, like animals, naturally multiply in proportion to the means of their subsistence.
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Nothing is more graceful than habitual cheerfulness.
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The great secret of education is to direct vanity to proper objects.
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The machines that are first invented to perform any particular movement are always the most complex, and succeeding artists generally discover that, with fewer wheels, with fewer principles of motion, than had originally been employed, the same effects may be more easily produced. The first systems, in the same manner, are always the most complex.
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It is not for its own sake that men desire money, but for the sake of what they can purchase with it.
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