Adam Smith Quotes

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.

There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.

The great secret of education is to direct vanity to proper objects.

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.

Virtue is excellence, something uncommonly great and beautiful, which rises far above what is vulgar and ordinary.

I have always considered David Hume as approaching as nearly the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will allow.

No society can surely be flourishing and happy of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable.

If there is any society
among robbers and murderers, they must at least. . . .abstain
from robbing and murdering one another. So beneficence
is less essential than justice is to the existence of society; a
lack of beneficence will make a society uncomfortable, but
the prevalence of injustice will utterly destroy it.