"Adam Smith" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... succeeding to any primacy. The Norman imposed his laws upon England; the courts, the parish-registers, the Acts of Parliament were all his; but to this day there are districts of the Saxon Island where the postman and census-taker inquire in vain for Adam Smith and Benjamin Brown, but must perforce seek out Bullhead and Bandyshins. So ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... shrines, intruders into the sanctuary, thrusting out the legitimate occupants. To reach down a well-bound semblance of a volume, and hope it some kind-hearted playbook; then, opening what "seem its leaves," to come bolt upon a withering Population Essay. To expect a Steele, or a Farquhar, and find—Adam Smith; to view a well-arranged assortment of block-headed Encyclopaedias (Anglicanas or Metropolitanas) set out in an array of Russia, or Morocco, when a tithe of that good leather would comfortably re-clothe my shivering folios; would renovate Paracelsus ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... than the exchange or delivery of tallies, pieces of wood notched or scored, corresponding blocks being kept by the parties to the account; and from this usage one of the head officers of the Exchequer was called the tallier, or teller. These tallies were often negotiable; Adam Smith, in his "Wealth of Nations," book ii., ch. xi., says that "in 1696 tallies had been at forty, and fifty, and sixty per cent. discount, and bank-notes at twenty per cent." The system of tallies was discontinued in 1824; and the destruction of the old Houses of ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... and Thackeray; the home of Newton, Adam Smith, Darwin and Lyell will ever remain a land of honour to educated Germans. Where would it end if I were to count up the heroes of English intellect whose names are written in letters of gold in humanity's ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... Louis had a place, and Sir Walter, as well as Kipling and Meredith and other moderns. But on the shelf that showed most wear were to be found the standard works of economists of different schools from the great Adam Smith to Marx and the lot of his imitators and disciples. This was Malcolm's book-case. There was in another corner near the fire-place a little table and above it hung a couple of shelves for books of another sort, the Bible and The Westminster Confession, Bunyan and Baxter and Fox's Book ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... self-government is closely associated with the question of self-support. Plenty of good land and the liberty to manage their own affairs were the causes assigned by Adam Smith for the marked prosperity of the British colonies towards the end of the 18th century. The same causes are still observed to produce the same effects, and it may be pointed out that, since the date of the latest of Adam Smith's writings, upwards of 6,000,000 sq. m. of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... casuistry of Boscovich in using the Copernican theory for "convenience in argument," while acquiescing in its condemnation by the Church authorities, this encyclical of Pope Benedict broke the spell. Turgot, Quesnay, Adam Smith, Hume, Bentham, and their disciples pressed on, and science won for mankind ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... with the University by far the greatest name, that of David Hume, had disappeared about ten years (p. 045) before Burns arrived in the capital. But his friend, Dr. Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations, still lingered. Mr. Henry Mackenzie, 'The Man of Feeling,' as he was called from his best known work, was at that time one of the most polished as well as popular ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... domestic affairs, it was a long hum-drum grind in settled grooves—deep ruts in fact—from which there seemed no escape. Yet it was a period in which great forces had their birth—forces which were destined to exercise the widest influence upon our national, social, and even domestic affairs. Adam Smith's great work on the causes of the wealth of nations planted a life-germ of progressive thought which was to direct men's minds into what, strange as it may seem, was almost a new field of research, viz., the relation of cause and effect, and ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... catholic: Samuel Pepys, immortally shameless; Adam Smith, shaken; Beaumont and Fletcher, in folio as they should always be found; Boswell's Johnson, of course, but Blackstone's "Commentaries" also; Plutarch's "Lives" and Increase Mather's witches; all of Fielding in four stately quarto volumes; Sterne, stained and shabby; ...
— Old Valentines - A Love Story • Munson Aldrich Havens
... to be proud of our fellow-countrymen. To take Philosophers and men of Science only, Bacon and Hobbes' Locke and Berkeley, Hume and Hamilton, will always be associated with the progress of human thought; Newton with gravitation, Adam Smith with Political Economy, Young with the undulatory theory of light, Herschel with the discovery of Uranus and the study of the star depths, Lord Worcester, Trevethick, and Watt with the steam-engine, Wheatstone with the electric telegraph, Jenner with the banishment of smallpox, Simpson ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... or earthenware: that "it was good for trade." His ideas of political economy would not permit him to allow that this axiom was a sound one for the benefit of the state; and on this point, I think, Adam Smith ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... replenish the reciprocal flow of export and import. That he at this time, or perhaps in truth at any time, had acquired complete mastery of those deeper principles and wider aspects of free trade of which Adam Smith had been the great exponent—principles afterwards enforced by the genius of Cobden with such admirable still, persistency, and patriotic spirit—there was nothing to show. Such a scheme had no originality in it. Huskisson, ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... which concern man or society. "For example, he had not read Montesquieu as this writer ought to be read, that is to say, in a way to accept or decidedly reject each of the thirty-one books of the 'Esprit des lois.' He had not thus read Bayle's Dictionary nor the Essay on the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. This ignorance of the Emperor's was not perceptible in conversation, and first, because he led in conversation, and next because with Italian finesse no question put by him, or careless supposition thrown out, ever betrayed that ignorance."—Bourrienne. I., 19, 21: At Brienne, "unfortunately ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... greatest political economists are on your side. I could fill a volume with quotations from the writings of the most learned political economists of all times in support of your position, but I shall only give one quotation. It is from Adam Smith's great work, The Wealth of Nations, and I quote it partly because no better statement of the principle has ever been made by any writer, and partly also because no one can accuse Adam Smith of being a "wicked Socialist trying to set class against ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... came of an Irish Protestant stock, and of a branch of it transplanted in the reign of George I from the county of Antrim to Tipperary. His father migrated, at nineteen, to the University of Glasgow (where he was contemporary with Adam Smith), graduated in 1761 or thereabouts, embraced the principles of the Unitarians, joined their ministry, and crossed over to England; being successively pastor at Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, at Marshfield in Gloucestershire, and at Maidstone. At Wisbech ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... principle appears to us to be laid down somewhat too broadly by Mr. M'Duffie, as we shall presently state, yet he is supported in his position, to the letter, by Hume, by Mr. Jefferson, and virtually by Adam Smith, if we suppose that from any cause the excess of gold and silver, which causes the depreciation, cannot be exported. They all agree in this, that the amount of money which can circulate, and which does in fact circulate in any country, depends upon the number and value ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... reveals a deplorable and revolting picture of vulgarity, insolence, and licence. The universities are spoken of in terms of disparagement by men of all classes. Lord Chesterfield speaks of the "rust" of Cambridge as something of which a polished man should promptly rid himself. Adam Smith showed his sense of the defects of Oxford in a stern section of the Wealth of Nations, written twenty years after he had left the place. Even youths like Gray and West, fresh from Eton, express themselves with contempt for their respective ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... Limitations of bequest and inheritance. Sec. 8. Social expediency of private property. Sec. 9. The monetary economy. Sec. 10. The competitive system. Sec. 11. Limitation of competition by custom. Sec. 12. Effect of modern forces upon custom. Sec. 13. Adam Smith's influence. Sec. 14. ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... principal endeavors to carry into effect the project so imperfectly traced out in the new decree of 1803. The opinion of the most vehement enemies of the privileged bodies tacitly approves this exception in their favor. Adam Smith, avowedly hostile to all monopolies, feels himself compelled to confess that, "without the incentives which exclusive companies offer to the individuals of a nation carrying on little trade, possibly their confined capitals would cease to be destined to the remote and uncertain enterprises ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... was not a great and useful minister; for though he would have been so had he carried out Adam Smith's doctrines of free trade, he did not ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... of goods is really measured in existing societies by the amount of work necessary to produce it—according to the teaching of Adam Smith and Ricardo, in whose footsteps Marx has followed—suffice it to say here, leaving ourselves free to return to the subject later, that the Collectivist ideal appears to us untenable in a society which considers the ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... its proper niche the volume he had been reading. It was Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, and he had been wondering by what ironical chance it had found a place ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... truth, and speaking of endeavour after accuracy in terms that are positively contemptuous. Whenever he was in the one mood he seemed to forget the possibility of any other; so much so that I have sometimes thought that he did this deliberately and for the same reasons as those which led Adam Smith to exclude one set of premises in his Theory of Moral Sentiments and another in his Wealth of Nations. I believe, however, that the explanation lies in the fact that my brother was inclined to underrate the importance of belief in the objective truth of any other ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... somebody else in nearly the same predicament. My chosen friend and ally, Bob M'Corkindale, was equally hard up with myself, and, if possible, more averse to exertion. Bob was essentially a speculative man—that is, in a philosophical sense. He had once got hold of a stray volume of Adam Smith, and muddled his brains for a whole week over the intricacies of the Wealth of Nations. The result was a crude farrago of notions regarding the true nature of money, the soundness of currency, and relative value of capital, with which he nightly favoured an admiring audience ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... for landing my luggage, was the A, followed by the old colonial C, preceded by the double D. Rapacity in Australia is the alpha and omega. Yet there were no poor! a grand reflection for the serious. Adam Smith, settled the question of "the wealth of nations." The source of pauperism will be settled in Victoria by any quill-driver, who has the pluck to write the history of public-houses in the towns, and sly-grog sellers ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... well-bound semblance of a volume, and hope it is some kind-hearted play-book, then, opening what "seem its leaves," to come bolt upon a withering Population Essay. To expect a Steele, or a Farquhar, and find—Adam Smith. To view a well-arranged assortment of blockheaded Encyclopaedias (Anglicanas or Metropolitanas) set out in an array of Russia, or Morocco, when a tithe of that good leather would comfortably re-clothe my shivering folios; would renovate Paracelsus himself, and enable old Raymund Lully to look ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... have studied hard, as Bentley and Clarke.' Trying him by that criterion upon which he formed his judgement of others, we may be absolutely certain, both from his writings and his conversation, that his reading was very extensive. Dr. Adam Smith, than whom few were better judges on this subject, once observed to me that 'Johnson knew more books than any man alive.' He had a peculiar facility in seizing at once what was valuable in any book, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... it may be unenlightened; but it is assumed as an axiom, that every man, in whatever he does, is aiming at something which he considers will promote his happiness. His conduct is not determined by his will; it is determined by the object of his desire. Adam Smith, in laying the foundations of political economy, expressly eliminates every other motive. He does not say that men never act on other motives; still less, that they never ought to act on other motives. He asserts merely that, as far ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... differentiation from him. Through imitation we appreciate the other person. We are in sympathy or en rapport with him, while at the same time we appropriate his sentiment and his technique. Ribot and Adam Smith analyze this relation of imitation to sympathy and Hirn points out that in art this process of internal imitation is ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... once conceded as just, this reasoning cannot be refuted. Discussed in economic literature since before the day of Adam Smith, it has withstood every form of assault. If it has not been acted on in the Old World, it is because the wage-workers there, ignorant and in general deprived of the right to vote, have been helpless; and if not in the New, because, first, until within recent years the free western ...
— Direct Legislation by the Citizenship through the Initiative and Referendum • James W. Sullivan
... greatest name is that of Adam Smith, whose works, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" and "Wealth of Nations," must be taken in conjunction. In the first he works on the assumption that sympathy is the mainspring of human conduct. In the "Wealth of Nations" ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... Defoe and Fielding, who introduced a new type of literature. The romantic poets and the novelists are reserved for special chapters; and of the other writers—Berkeley and Hume in philosophy; Robertson, Hume, and Gibbon in history; Chesterfield and Lady Montagu in letter writing; Adam Smith in economics; Pitt, Burke, Fox, and a score of lesser writers in politics—we select only two, Burke and Gibbon, whose works are most typical of the Augustan, i.e. the elegant, classic style ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... understand political economy, you know," said Mr. Brooke, smiling towards Mr. Casaubon. "I remember when we were all reading Adam Smith. There is a book, now. I took in all the new ideas at one time—human perfectibility, now. But some say, history moves in circles; and that may be very well argued; I have argued it myself. The fact is, human reason may carry ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... for crime. The third was the Spirit of Laws, by Montesquieu. It placed legislation on the basis of philosophy; and straightway law began to spring up among the nations out of a new soil. The fourth and last great work—An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith—was by far the most influential of them all. 'It is,' says Sir James, 'perhaps the only book which produced an immediate, general, and irrevocable change in some of the most important parts of the legislation of all civilised states. Touching ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... a changed man—industrious, thrifty, Christian. Whereas he had been idle now he devoted his leisure time to reading and it is said that one of the books that he read was Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.[18] By his application to reading and writing he was able in a little time to make dray tickets and to act as shipping clerk.[19] His work in the warehouse was "such as no person, white ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... perhaps to be regretted that the late Adam Smith did not make an inquiry into the subject of Books and their Prices. The result, if not as exhaustive as the 'Wealth of Nations,' would have been quite as important a contribution to the science of social economy. ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... blinds them to the fact, that, with nations as with individuals, a healthy competition is the one essential to all true economy and real excellence. Monopolists are always blind, always practise a false economy. Adam Smith tells us that "it is not more than fifty years ago that some of the counties in the neighborhood of London petitioned the Parliament against the extension of the turnpike roads into the remoter counties. Those remoter counties, they pretended, from the cheapness ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... then, that by the effect of what Adam Smith calls the higgling of the market, 10 yards of cloth, in both countries, exchange for 17 yards ...
— Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... others have time and again made the mistake of simplifying human life to a single motive or driving power. Hobbes rested his case on fear; Bain and Sutherland on sympathy; Tarde on imitation; Adam Smith and Bentham on enlightened self-interest. In our own day the Freudians interpret everything as being sexual in its motive. And most recently has come an interpretation of life, as in Bertrand Russell and Helen Marot, in terms of the ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... in the previous hundred years; and none of his reviews exhibits the feeling so common among men of letters in all ages, that their own times are intellectually degenerate. It is true that he looked back to the days of Blair, Hume, Adam Smith, Robertson, and Ferguson, as the "golden days of Edinburgh,"[27] but those golden days were no farther away than his own boyhood, and he had felt the exhilaration of the stimulating society which he praised. One of his contemporaries spoke of Scott's own works as throwing "a literary ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... Adam Smith was not altogether the originator of the idea of free trade; and six hundred years have passed without bringing Europe generally to the degree of mercantile intelligence, as to weights and currency, which Florence had in her ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... such a man as Priestley, being a Unitarian, could neither teach nor preach, and was liable to ruinous fines and long imprisonment. [17] In those days the guns that were pointed by the Church against the Dissenters were shotted. The law was a cesspool of iniquity and cruelty. Adam Smith was a new prophet whom few regarded, and commerce was hampered by idiotic impediments, and ruined by still more absurd help, on the ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... most of the operations in factories, where the division of labour is carried to a considerable extent, are paid for as piece-work. It is difficult to estimate in numbers the effect of this cause upon production. In nail-making, Adam Smith has stated, that it is almost three to one; for, he observes, that a smith accustomed to make nails, but whose whole business has not been that of a nailer, can make only from eight hundred to a thousand per day; whilst a ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... he had suffered. They knew that the horrors of death would fall upon him, and that God would get his revenge. But his attending physician said that his death was the most serene and most perfectly tranquil of any he had ever seen. Adam Smith said he was as near perfect as the frailty incident to humanity would allow ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... revolutions in every town. Here is a nation,' goes on Wainwright, 'on the brink of destruction. A man of intelligence could rescue it from its impending doom in one day by issuing the necessary edicts and orders. President Gomez knows nothing of statesmanship or policy. Do you know Adam Smith?' ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry |
