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Individual Ambition Serves the Common Good.

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
Good
Serves
Economics
Ambition
Common
Individual

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Though the profusion of Government must undoubtedly have retarded the natural progress of England to wealth and improvement, it has not been able to stop it.
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Happiness never lays its finger on its pulse.
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Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production.
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Problems worthy of attacks, prove their worth by hitting back
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Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.
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All money is a matter of belief.
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Great nations are never impoverished by private, though they sometimes are by public prodigality and misconduct.
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Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen, it is always just and equitable but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters.
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The real price of everything, what everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.
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The importation of gold and silver is not the principal, much less the sole benefit which a nation derives from its foreign trade.
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China is a much richer country than any part of Europe.
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Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions.
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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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The propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals.
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We are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it.
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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 nation is not made wealthy by the childish accumulation of shiny metals, but it enriched by the economic prosperity of it's people.
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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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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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