An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations Quotes

“Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. ”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“In regards to the price of commodities, the rise of wages operates as simple interest does, the rise of profit operates like compound interest.

Our merchants and masters complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and lessening the sale of goods. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“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.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“Man is an animal that makes bargains: no other animal does this - no dog exchanges bones with another.”
― Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

“Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. Nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that yours; I am willing to give this for that....But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“The value of any commodity, therefore, to the person who possesses it, and who means not to use or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity of labour which it enables him to purchase or command. Labour, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities. 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.”
― Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

“As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce. The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the labourer only the trouble of gathering them, come, even to him, to have an additional price fixed upon them. He must then pay for the licence to gather them, and must give up to the landlord a portion of what his labour either collects or produces. This portion, or, what comes to the same thing, the price of this portion, constitutes the rent of land, and in the price of the greater part of commodities, makes a third”
― Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

“The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more; otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“Money, says the proverb, makes money. When you have got a little, it is often easy to get more. The great difficulty is to get that little.”
― The University of Chicago Press, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniencies of life which it annually consumes, and which consist always either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations.”
― Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

“What is the species of domestic industry which his capital can employ, and of which the produce is likely to be of the greatest value, every individual, it is evident, can, in his local situation, judge much better than any statesman or lawgiver can do for him. The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it. ”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“It is the interest of every man to live as much at his ease as he can; and if his emoluments are to be precisely the same, whether he does or does not perform some very laborious duty, it is certainly his interest, at least as interest is vulgarly understood, either to neglect it altogether, or, if he is subject to some authority which will not suffer him to do this, to perform it in as careless and slovenly a manner as that authority will permit.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“According, therefore, as this produce, or what is purchased with it, bears a greater or smaller proportion to the number of those who are to consume it, the nation will be better or worse supplied with all the necessaries and conveniencies for which it has occasion.”
― Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

“The wages of labour are the encouragement of industry, which, like every other human quality, improves in proportion to the encouragement it receives.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“Adam Smith FRSE (baptised June 5, 1723 O.S. / June 16 N.S. – July 17, 1790) was a Scottish moral philosopher and a pioneering political economist. He is also the founder of economics. One of the key figures of the intellectual movement known as the Scottish Enlightenment, he is known primarily as the author of two treatises: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). The latter was one of the earliest attempts to systematically study the historical development of industry and commerce in Europe, as well as a sustained attack on the doctrines of mercantilism. Smith's work helped to create the modern academic discipline of economics and provided one of the best-known intellectual rationales for free trade, capitalism, and libertarianism. Adam Smith is now depicted on the back of the Bank of England £20 note. Source: Wikipedia”
― Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

“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.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“But this proportion must in every nation be regulated by two different circumstances: first, by the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which its labour is generally applied; and, secondly, by the proportion between the number of those who are employed in useful labour, and that of those who are not so employed. Whatever be the soil, climate, or extent of territory of any particular nation, the abundance or scantiness of its annual supply must, in that particular situation, depend upon those two circumstances.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“The division of labour, however, so far as it can be introduced, occasions, in every art, a proportionable increase of the productive powers of labour.”
― Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

“We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“It is not for its own sake that men desire money, but for the sake of what they can purchase with it.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased;”
― Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

“Powers”
― Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

“Commerce and manufactures can seldom flourish long in any state which does not enjoy a regular administration of justice, in which the people do not feel themselves secure in the possession of their property, in which the faith of contracts is not supported by law, and in which the authority of the state is not supposed to be regularly employed in enforcing the payment of debts from all those who are able to pay. Commerce and manufactures, in
short, can seldom flourish in any state in which there is not a certain degree of confidence in the justice of government.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations