Adam Smith

A monopoly granted either to an individual or to a trading company has the same effect as a secret in trade or manufactures.

Adam Smith

A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural.

Adam Smith

A sketch of a man facing to the right.

Adam Smith

A true party-man hates and despises candour.

Adam Smith

A very poor man may be said in some sense to have a demand for a coach and six; he might like to have it; but his demand is not an effectual demand, as the commodity can never be brought to market in order to satisfy it.

Adam Smith

Adventure upon all the tickets in the lottery, and you lose for certain; and the greater the number of your tickets the nearer your approach to this certainty.

Adam Smith

After all that has been said of the levity and inconstancy of human nature, it appears evidently from experience, that man is, of all sorts of luggage, the most difficult to be transported.

Adam Smith

All registers which, it is acknowledged, ought to be kept secret, ought certainly never to exist.

Adam Smith

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.

Adam Smith

As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation.

Adam Smith