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That a joint stock company should be able to carry on successfully any branch of foreign trade, when private adventurers can come into any sort of open and fair competition with them, seems contrary to all experience.

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
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Foreign
Adventurers
Open
Fairs
Adventurer
Company
Fair
Joint
Experience
Contrary
Joints
Seems
Carry
Successfully
Able
Competition
Branch
Come
Private
Stock
Trade
Branches

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The annual produce of the land and labour of any nation can be increased in its value by no other means, but by increasing either the number of its productive labourers, or the productive powers of those labourers who had before been employed.
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Beneficence is always free, it cannot be extorted by force.
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Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor.
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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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Defense is superior to opulence.
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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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The great secret of education is to direct vanity to proper objects.
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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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A merchant, it has been said very properly, is not necessarily the citizen of any particular country.
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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. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged.
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When we have read a book or poem so often that we can no longer find any amusement in reading it by ourselves, we can still take pleasure in reading it to a companion. To him it has all the graces of novelty.
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The proprietor of stock is necessarily a citizen of the world, and is not necessarily attached to any particular country.
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The education of the common people requires, perhaps, in a civilized and commercial society, the attention of the public more than that of people of some rank and fortune.
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To hinder, besides, the farmer from selling his goods at all times to the best market, is evidently to sacrifice the ordinary laws of justice to an idea of public utility, to a sort of reasons of state an act of legislative authority which ought to be exercised only, which can be pardoned only in cases of the most urgent necessity.
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Secrets in manufactures are capable of being longer kept than secrets in trade.
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Upstart greatness is everywhere less respected than ancient greatness.
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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.
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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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The liberal reward of labor, therefore, as it is the necessary effect, so it is the natural symptom of increasing national wealth. The scanty maintenance of the laboring poor, on the other hand, is the natural symptom that things are at a stand, and their starving condition that they going backwards fast.
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Ask any rich man of common prudence to which of the two sorts of people he has lent the greater part of his stock, to those who, he thinks, will employ it profitably, or to those who will spend it idly, and he will laugh at you for proposing the question.
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