"Adam Smith" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— Old Valentines - A Love Story • Munson Aldrich Havens
... have every reason 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 ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... 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 ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... and not the shallow players who impersonate all parts. It is the man who never steps outside of his specialty or dissipates his individuality. It is an Edison, a Morse, a Bell, a Howe, a Stephenson, a Watt. It is Adam Smith, spending ten years on the "Wealth of Nations." It is Gibbon, giving twenty years to his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." It is a Hume, writing thirteen hours a day on his "History of England." It is a Webster, spending thirty-six years on his dictionary. It is a Bancroft, ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... mere clothing in which his ideas were placed before the world. The body was common property. So, too, with Bacon and Locke, Leibnitz and Descartes, Franklin, Priestley, and Davy, Quesnay, Turgot, and Adam Smith, Lamarck and Cuvier, and all other men who have aided in carrying science to the point at which it has now arrived. They have had no property in their ideas. If they labored, it was because they had a thirst for knowledge. ...
— Letters on International Copyright; Second Edition • Henry C. Carey
... 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 in the ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... self-interest, 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 as the arts of production are concerned, and of buying ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... antagonism to the State as such. Thus the political theory of Milton and the Puritans not only justified resistance to Charles I, it also proclaimed a doctrine of the natural rights of the individual fatal to all types of government. Similarly the political theory of Adam Smith and the laissez-faire economists, together with that of their contemporaries, Bentham and the utilitarian philosophers, not only attacked the restrictive regulations of the Whig oligarchy, but showed ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... 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 ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... The root of all the altruistic sentiments is sympathy; and sympathy could become dominant only when the mode of life, instead of being one that habitually inflicted direct pain, became one which conferred direct and indirect benefits: the pains inflicted being mainly incidental and indirect. Adam Smith made a large step towards this truth when he recognized sympathy as giving rise to these superior controlling emotions. His Theory of Moral Sentiments, however, requires to be supplemented in two ways. The ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... 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
... of 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
... symbols which organize his following. What privileges do within the hierarchy, symbols do for the rank and file. They conserve unity. From the totem pole to the national flag, from the wooden idol to God the Invisible King, from the magic word to some diluted version of Adam Smith or Bentham, symbols have been cherished by leaders, many of whom were themselves unbelievers, because they were focal points where differences merged. The detached observer may scorn the "star-spangled" ritual which hedges the symbol, perhaps ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... substituting in their place the most unfavourable he could find. He gave the philosophic circle in Paris exquisite delight by the confirmation which his story furnished of their own foresight, when they had warned him that he was taking a viper to his bosom. Finally, in spite of the advice of Adam Smith, of one of the greatest of men, Turgot, and one of the smallest, Horace Walpole, he published a succinct account of the quarrel, first in French, and then in English. This step was chiefly due to the advice of the clique of whom D'Alembert was the spokesman, though it is due to him ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... both for art and learning; Hume, Reid, and Stewart, carried metaphysical inquiry to its utmost depth; Gray, Burns, Goldsmith, Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth, were not unworthy successors of Dryden and Pope; Adam Smith called into existence the science of political economy, and nearly brought it to perfection in a single lifetime; Reynolds and West adorned the galleries with pictures which would not have disgraced the land ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... your books very soon. I only wish to give Dr. Adam Smith one other perusal, which I will do in one or ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... probably, and more poetically too, for the refreshment of the toiling citizens of the smoky town, who wander about among these sylvan recesses, with their wives and families, and enjoy the wondrous beauty of the landscape, without having consulted Burke or Adam Smith on the causes of their delight. As you climb upwards towards the observatory, you fancy you are attending one of Buckland's lectures—the whole language you hear is geological and philosophic. About a dozen men, with little tables before them, are dispersed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... 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 another ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... below VIII. C2.5) Worthy of Adam Smith. Xenophon has bump of economy strongly developed; he resembles J. P.[*] in that respect. The economic methodism, the mosaic interbedding, the architectonic structure of it all, a part and parcel of Xenophon's genius. Was Alexander's army a highly-organised, spiritually and materially built-up, ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... by the crumbling of an idol or the disclosure of a skeleton; judge talent at its best and character at its worst; suspect power more than vice,[89] and study problems in preference to periods; for instance: the derivation of Luther, the scientific influence of Bacon, the predecessors of Adam Smith, the mediaeval masters of Rousseau, the consistency of Burke, the identity of the first Whig. Most of this, I suppose, is undisputed, and calls for no enlargement. But the weight of opinion is against me when I exhort you never to debase the moral ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... Terrae Filius 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 ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... time to time by professional politicians as a kind of Pegasus upon which they fondly hope to ride into power—ever carefully considered the question in all its bearings; studied it from a national, sectional or even individual standpoint. Questions upon which Adam Smith and Auguste Compte, Jefferson and Hamilton disagreed, are settled by the dicta of a partisan convention—composed chiefly of political hacks and irresponsible hoodlums—with less trouble than a colored ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... truth of this principle may be slow in development, as all truths are, and ever have been, in the various branches of science. It was so with the principles announced by Galileo; it was so with Adam Smith and his principles of political economy; It was so with Harvey in his theory of the circulation of the blood. It is said that not a single one of the medical profession, at the time of the announcement ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... said, in 1764, that the poor people in Ireland were used "worse than negroes." "Aristocracy," said Adam Smith, "was not founded in the natural and respectable distinctions of birth and fortune, but in the most odious of all distinctions, those of religious and political prejudices—distinctions which, more than any other, animate both the insolence of the oppressors, and the hatred and indignation ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... free labour achieved a wonderful popularity; but then, as the writer I have just quoted reminds us: "Free labour had not Adam Smith's meaning: it meant the freedom of the employer to take what labour he wanted, at the price he chose and under the conditions he ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various
... become thinner, the professorships will again become poorer. The decline will become rapid and headlong. In a short time, the lectures will be delivered to empty rooms: the grass will grow in the courts: and men not fit to be village dominies will occupy the chairs of Adam Smith and Dugald Stewart, of Reid and Black, of ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and even sometimes chickens. They required no pay beyond a nod and a smile, and went away happy at those slender recognitions. Felix discovered, in fact, that they had got into a region where the arid generalizations of political economy do not apply; where Adam Smith is unread, and Mill neglected; where the medium of exchange is an unknown quantity, and where supply and demand readjust themselves continuously by simpler and more generous principles than the familiar European one of "the ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... 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 was commercially almost as much a new birth ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... of name. "Political Economy" has been painted out, and instead we read "Economics—under entirely new management." Modern Economics differs mainly from old Political Economy in having produced no Adam Smith. The old "Political Economy" made certain generalisations, and they were mostly wrong; new Economics evades generalisations, and seems to lack the intellectual power to make them. The science hangs like a gathering fog in a valley, a fog which begins nowhere and goes nowhere, ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... was less. Hence the English legislation throttling colonial manufacturers in the supposed interests of English merchants, and confining colonial trade to English channels. Hence the disregard, persistent and unashamed, of Adam Smith's immortal saying: "To prohibit a great people from making all that they can of every part of their own produce, or from employing their stock and industry in the way that they judge most advantageous to themselves, is a manifest violation ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... German J. B. Say's "Traite D'Economie Politique Pratique" (Leipsic, 1845-46). And although he also translated Adam Smith, he was never able to get beyond the narrow circle of the ordinary bourgeois economic ideas. His "League of Egoists" is only the Utopia of a petty bourgeois in revolt. In this sense one may say he has spoken the ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... Adam Smith too, in book 5, c. 1, of his 'Wealth of Nations,' assures us the ancient Greek philosophy was divided, into three branches—Physics, Ethics, and Logic; and after praising such general division of philosophy, as ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... to remain unanswered, it would be proclaimed in all the strongholds of monopoly to which British literature penetrates—in Parliament, in Congress, in the Algemeine Zeitung, and in the councils of the Zollverein—that Adam Smith and the modern economists had been refuted by Colonel Torrens; that free trade is good only where reciprocity is perfect; that a nation can augment its wealth by restraining a trade that was previously free; can protect ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... which contributed to the change of attitude towards the colonies was the growing influence of a new school of economic thought, the school of Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Malthus. Their ideas had begun to affect national policy as early as the twenties, when Huskisson took the first steps on the way to free trade. In the thirties the bulk of the trading and industrial classes had become converts to these ideas, which won ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... 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 he married Grace ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... Physiocrats, of all the groups the one that possessed the most compact body of consistent views, and who already knew most of the accepted doctrines of political economy, although they ended by making way for Adam Smith. They are of supreme importance to us, because they founded political science on the economic science which was coming into existence. Harrington, a century before, had seen that the art of government can be reduced to system; but the French economists precede all men in this, that ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... qualities. Especially his intellect had a strong substratum of downright dogged common sense; his religion, one may conjecture, was pretty much that of all men of sense in his time. It was that of the society which had produced and been influenced by Hume and Adam Smith; which had dropped its old dogmas without becoming openly sceptical, but which emphatically took 'common sense' for the motto of its philosophy. It was equally afraid of bigotry and scepticism and had manufactured ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... outstanding personalities have moulded life and thought through the centuries, and have profoundly changed whole regions of country. Mohammed and Confucius put their personal stamp upon the Orient; Caesar and Napoleon made and remade western Europe; Adam Smith and Darwin swayed economic and scientific England; Washington and ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... essential justice of Carlyle's estimate. Nor need we dispute his estimate of the vigour and manliness of Burns. It is only when Carlyle describes him as "the most gifted British soul" in the eighteenth century—the century of Hume, Adam Smith, Fielding, and Burke—that we begin to smile. Burns was a noble-hearted fellow, as well as a born poet. But perhaps the whole cycle of Sartorian extravaganza contains no saying so futile as the complaint, that the British nation in the great war with France entrusted ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... life. The old man's mind is stored with the memories of a well-filled and honourable life. In the long leisures that now fall to his lot he is often enabled to resume projects which in a crowded professional life he had been obliged to adjourn; he finds (as Adam Smith has said) that one of the greatest pleasures in life is reverting in old age to the studies of youth, and he himself often feels something of the thrill of a second youth in his sympathy with the children who are around him. It is the St. Martin's summer, lighting with a pale ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... that the moral effect would be immense. "The public system of government is the true education of moral man. Regis ad exemplum totus componitur orbis." [Footnote: The particulars of the Physiocratic doctrine as to the relative values of agriculture and commerce which Adam Smith was soon to criticise do not concern us; nor is it necessary to repeat the obvious criticisms on a theory which virtually reduced the science of society to a science ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... mind and the effects which our reasoning powers and our passions produce upon the actions of our lives." It has nothing to do with ethics or duty. And the definition used in Edinburgh is also used in Albemarle Street. Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown[30] and Adam Smith, Hume and Reid and Oswald and Beattie and Ferguson, are names which meet us on every page. The lecturer has learnt from Scotsmen, and reproduces what the Scotsmen taught him. Mind and Matter are two great realities. When people are informed that all thought is explained by vibrations ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... 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 ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... conditions is perhaps best marked in the state of the universities. Universities have at different periods been great centres of intellectual life. The English universities of the eighteenth century are generally noted only as embodiments of sloth and prejudice. The judgments of Wesley and Gibbon and Adam Smith and Bentham coincide in regard to Oxford; and Johnson's love of his university is an equivocal testimony to its intellectual merits. We generally think of it as of a sleepy hollow, in which portly fellows of colleges, like the convivial Warton, imbibed port wine and sneered at Methodists, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... apology 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 those matters which may ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... prepared with arguments as I ought to have been. That is all in the Gospel according to Adam Smith, which my father had been brought up in, but of which the tenets had begun to be less binding in my day. I wanted something more, or else something less; but my views were not so clear, nor my system so logical and well-built, as that upon which ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... into closer contact, we do not at present hear much of the old plan for giving seats to colonial representatives in the British Parliament. It was discussed in old days by men of great authority. Burke had no faith in it, while Adam Smith argued in its favour. Twenty years before the beginning of the final struggle the plan was rejected by Franklin. In 1831 Joseph Hume proposed that India should have four members, the Crown colonies eight, the West Indies three, and the Channel Islands ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 9: The Expansion of England • John Morley
... Tocqueville. John Stuart Mill. Fawcett. Laveleye. Adam Smith. Cornewall Lewis. Lord Brougham. Sir ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... Carlyle, from his noble head and imposing person, born in Dumfriesshire; minister of Inveresk, Musselburgh, from 1747 to his death; friend of David Hume, Adam Smith, and Home, the author of "Douglas"; a leader of the Moderate party in the Church of Scotland; left an "Autobiography," which was not published till 1860, which shows its author to have been a man who took things as he found them, and enjoyed them to the full as any ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... and indolence, gluttony and sensuality, and even a proverbial uselessness been objected to us, perhaps not always by our enemies nor wholly without ground?" So said Wesley, preaching before the University of Oxford in 1744, and the words in his mouth imply more than the preacher's formality. Adam Smith, Johnson's junior by fourteen years, was so impressed by the utter indifference of Oxford authorities to their duties, as to find in it an admirable illustration of the consequences of the neglect of the true principles of supply and demand implied ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... Adam Smith observes, "The chairmen, porters, and coal-heavers in London, and those unfortunate women who live by prostitution, the strongest men and the most beautiful women perhaps in the British dominions, are said to be, the greater part of them, ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... value 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 instruments of labour as a common ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... commercial interests without slavery? Was trade everything? Were the merchants the leaders of civilization? Were merchants to be permitted to do what they chose in order that they might create wealth for themselves, or even the nation? In a word, was wealth everything? My Adam Smith had said no, and I had already read that. He had classified banks of issue, colonialism, and slavery, as well as some other things as equal parts of a mercantile program. I was, therefore, inclined to dissent from any plan that included any one of these things. And still ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... extent and in quality as to furnish a complete system of means for the training up of the youth of the country to perform efficiently all the services required by such a complex community as the modern State. This duty devolves upon the State chiefly for the reason set forth by Adam Smith in his discussion of the functions of government. It is the duty of the sovereign, he declares, to erect and maintain certain "public institutions which it can never be for the interest of any individual to erect and maintain, because the profit could never repay the expense to the ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... territorial, commercial, and industrial situation. The demand for workers in relation to the supply of workers is considerably greater than in Europe. And this truth is known already to every pupil of Adam Smith. ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... Charles Knight, under the Superintendence of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. No. XLIII. (December, 1835), containing Adam Smith, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 219, January 7, 1854 • Various
... more, to do with it. Whether one sorts soiled clothes in a laundry, or reclines on a chaise-longue with thirty-eight small hand-embroidered and belaced pillows and a pink satin covering, or sits in a library and fusses over Adam Smith, no one of the three is in a position to pass judgment on the satisfaction or lack of satisfaction ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... various editions, Burns. Beside the poets Robert 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 ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... the insight into social life developed by economic and sociological work in college. Read them with the critical social and political situations in mind. Read entire books at a sitting to absorb the spiritual valor of the prophets and their sense of God and of righteousness. George Adam Smith's "The Book of the Twelve Prophets" has fine social understanding, and gives ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... of economical principles given in the text, though I know that most, if not all, of them are accepted by existing authorities on the science, are not supported by references, because I have never read any author on political economy, except Adam Smith, twenty years ago. Whenever I have taken up any modern book upon this subject, I have usually found it encumbered with inquiries into accidental or minor commercial results, for the pursuit of which an ordinary reader ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... that Mr. 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 year ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... appellations, or in proper names. It is the question of the primum cognitum, and its consideration will help us perhaps in discovering the true nature of the root, or the primum appellatum. Some philosophers, among whom I may mention Locke, Condillac, Adam Smith, Dr. Brown, and, with some qualification, Dugald Stewart, maintain that all terms, as at first employed, are expressive of individual objects. I quote from Adam Smith. 'The assignation,' he says, 'of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... power of water to quench flames who try to extinguish with a cupful a whole burning wagon-load of fagots." He also says that "the feeling of distress is the root of benevolence, therefore a benevolent man is ever mindful of those who are suffering and in distress." Thus did Mencius long anticipate Adam Smith who founds ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... dignity in the periods of Jewish prosperity and settled city life. But, as George Adam Smith points out accurately, the prevailing character of Judea is naturally pastoral, with husbandry only incidental. "Judea, indeed, offers as good ground as there is in all the East for observing the grandeur of the shepherd's ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... as the most intricate part of the subject, he made me read in the same manner Ricardo's admirable pamphlets, written during what was called the Bullion controversy; to these succeeded Adam Smith; and in this reading it was one of my father's main objects to make me apply to Smith's more superficial view of political economy, the superior lights of Ricardo, and detect what was fallacious in Smith's arguments, or erroneous in any of his conclusions. Such a mode of ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... knowledge-diffuser is looking over my shoulder, and tells me, "Increase education, and cheapen good books, and all this rubbish will disappear!" Sir, I don't believe a word of it. If you printed Ricardo and Adam Smith at a farthing a volume, I still believe that they would be as little read by the operatives as they are nowadays by a very large proportion of highly-cultivated men. I still believe that, while the press works, attacks ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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
... NEWTON: ADAM SMITH.—Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), the discoverer of the law of gravitation, made, through his Principia, one of the most important contributions ever made to the advancement of physical science. In 1776 Adam Smith, a Scotchman, who had previously written on metaphysics and ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... * Adam Smith makes the pithy observation that the man who sympathises with a woman in childbed, cannot be said to put himself in her place. ("The Theory of the Moral Sentiments," Part vii. sec. iii. chap. i.) Perhaps ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... 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
... failed. He descended to apparently insignificant, but yet most characteristic, particulars. Thus he apologizes for informing the reader that Johnson, when journeying, "carried in his hand a large English oak-stick:" adding, "I remember Dr. Adam Smith, in his rhetorical lectures at Glasgow, told us he was glad to know that Milton wore latchets in his shoes instead of buckles." Boswell lets us know how Johnson looked, what dress he wore, what was his talk, what were his prejudices. He painted ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... Burke's name was, that he at one time actually did visit America. This was just as untrue as that he became a convert to the Catholic faith; or that he was the lover of Peg Woffington; or that he contested Adam Smith's chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow along with Hume, and that both Burke and Hume were rejected in favour of some fortunate Mr. James Clow. They are all alike unfounded. But the same letter informs Shackleton of a circumstance more real and more important than any of these, though its ...
— Burke • John Morley
... ideal, and as to its efficiency as the vastest and most ingenious invention for human progress. We, who have been reared and trained under the individualistic philosophy of the Declaration of Independence and the laisser-faire philosophy of Adam Smith, are loath to see and loath to acknowledge this patent fact of human history. We see the Pharaohs, Caesars, Toussaints and Napoleons of history and forget the vast races of which they were but epitomized expressions. We are apt to think in our American impatience, that while it may have ...
— The Conservation of Races - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 2 • W. E. Burghardt Du Bois
... time in England, Adam Smith was working on his mighty volumes on the "Wealth of Nations," which made another plea for "liberty" and the "natural rights of trade." Thirty years later, after the fall of Napoleon, when the reactionary powers of Europe had gained their victory at ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... of commerce, and the wealth of nations, as laid down by Adam Smith in his great work, which is almost deserving of immortality for the truths it tells mankind, are as true and as sure in practice as they are in theory; and should the wisdom and truth of his investigations ever be applied to the commercial ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... misteachings of Adam Smith, of Darwin and Defoe. Smith's "Wealth of Nations" presumed the material debasement of darker peoples of colonial populations, or, in lieu thereof, such debasement of Slav, Serf or Serbian as would compensate the vanity of the superior people. Indirectly, Darwin taught, that the Negro ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... bayonets of the guards, a willing sacrifice, as he believes, poor fellow, for a great public principle. In his pocket he has three pamphlets, 'On Water Drinking, or The Blessings of Imprisonment for Debt,'—and Adam Smith's 'Moral Essays.'—Ruffles hang from his wrists, the relics of former days, rags cover his feeble legs, one foot is naked, and his appearance is that of a decaying being, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • Various
... reforming the tariff both to relieve trade, and to stimulate and 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 ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... the round peg in the round hole brings difficulties. When Adam Smith asserted that of all sorts of luggage man was the most difficult to move, he forgot woman! The instant women are carried into a new industry, they bring with them puzzling problems. Where shall we put their coats ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch
... why, like property, they are all contradictory of each other, and half the time inapplicable. The proof of this assertion, which is, in one sense, a denial of political economy as handed down to us by Adam Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, and J. B. Say, and as we have known it for half a century, will be especially ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... itself now and then in the flowery little by-paths that run so pleasantly close to the straight and narrow way. It was not in the confessional that Filangieri and Gioja and Romagnosi studied, that Adam Smith sought the secret of national prosperity, or that Sismondi found that perennial fountain of generous sympathies, which, through his fifty years of incessant labor, welled up with such a quickening and invigorating vitality from the profound investigations of the historian and the patient statistics ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... great fool until he kens Latin. Adam Smith or some book o' commercial economics wad set ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... story of Adam Smith was told recently at a convention in Kirkaldy, Scotland, the birthplace of the economist. The professor fell in love and proposed. The offer was refused. Next day the lady met Smith in Princess street, ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... logically, scientifically, historically, ethically altogether wrong; and yet you may exercise an irresistible literary fascination over your own generation and all that follow. Charles Lamb speaks disdainfully of books which are no books, things in books' clothing. He had in mind Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, essays on population, treatises on moral philosophy, and so forth. He meant that such works are works, but no literature. Mill's Logic, geographical descriptions, guidebooks, the Origin of Species, whatever may be the value of such ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... light was expensive, made a blaze of shavings in the cooper's shop. He waylaid every visitor to New Salem who had any pretence to scholarship, and extracted explanations of things which he did not understand. It does not appear that the work of Adam Smith, or any work upon political economy, currency, or any financial subject fell into the hands of the student who was destined to conduct the most tremendous operations in the ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... 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, without submitting to the labour of perusing ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... should not be otherwise accompanied. The Dominie loved his young charge, and was enraptured with his own success in having already brought him so far in his learning as to spell words of three syllables. The idea of this early prodigy of erudition being carried off by the gipsies, like a second Adam Smith,[Footnote: The father of Economical Philosophy was, when a child, actually carried off by gipsies, and remained some hours in their possession.] was not to be tolerated; and accordingly, though the charge was contrary to all his ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... brilliant paradox,—that "a glutted market is not a proof that we produce too much but that we produce too little! for in that case there is not enough produced to exchange with what is produced!" As Frenchmen excel in politeness and impudence, Monsieur Say adds, "I revere Adam Smith; he is my master; but this first of political economists did not understand all the phenomena of production and consumption." We, who remain uninitiated in this mystery of explaining the operations of trade by metaphysical ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... The economic loss through the non-productivity of 20,000 drunkards is equal to one Chicago fire involving two hundred millions. Of course, some men produce less and others more than $600 a year; and some there are who have no industrial value—non-producers, according to Adam Smith; paupers, according to John Stuart Mill; thieves, according to Paul, who says, "Let him that stole steal no more, but rather work." In this group let us include the tramps, who hold that the world owes them a living; these are they who fail to realize that society has given them support ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... had brought with him a selection of solid books from his library, and over these the greater part of each day was spent. Not that he studied with any zeal; reading, and of a kind that demanded close attention, was his only resource against melancholia; he knew not how else to occupy himself. Adam Smith's classical work, perused with laborious thoroughness, gave him employment for a couple of months; subsequently he plodded through all the volumes ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... subject on which I wish to say a few words. The definition given by Adam Smith of the three elements of national wealth, "Land, Labour, and Capital," cannot be too often repeated. How to blend them in proper proportions, is a problem, which has puzzled generations of statesmen, philosophers, and philanthropists. ...
— A Winter Tour in South Africa • Frederick Young
... Philosophers and 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 ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... thing." The Prussian landlord, whose soul was steeped in free trade so long as Prussia was a grain-exporting country, cherishes protectionist convictions now that she must largely import cereals. The bureaucrat who had never sworn by other economic lawgivers than Adam Smith and his followers, now accepts Professor Adolphus Wagner's ever-changing sophisms. And as for the south and the west of Germany, why, they adore the man who had fulfilled that dream of protection in which they, as disciples of Friedrich List, had grown up. It is true that all large cities, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... 517. Iron was also the currency of the Spartans, but it has been used as such in much more recent times. Adam Smith, in his Wealth of Nations (Book I. ch. 4, published in 1776), says, "there is at this day a village in Scotland where it is not uncommon, I am told, for a workman to carry nails, instead of money, to the baker's ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... does not consider, what becomes of B's money; he does see what is done with A's; he observes the amount of industry which A's profusion feeds; he observes not the far greater quantity which it prevents from being fed; and thence the prejudice, universal to the time of Adam Smith, that prodigality encourages industry, and parsimony is ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... sufficiently indicated, but we may here add a word as to the bearings which certain moot questions in the theory of the subject may have on the methods of teaching. The fundamental theory of economics has, since the days of Adam Smith, been undergoing a process of continuous transition, but the broader concepts never have been more in dispute than in the last quarter century in America. The possibility of such diversity of opinion in the fundamentals among the leading exponents ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... have stated, the truth of this principle may be slow in development, as all truths are and ever have been, in the various branches of science. It was so with the principles announced by Galileo. It was so with Adam Smith and his principles of political economy. It was so with Harvey and his theory of the circulation of the blood; it is stated that not a single one of the medical profession, living at the time of the announcement of the truths made by him, admitted them. Now they ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... of James Watt, or to recount the glorious names in philosophy, in history, in poetry and romance, and in every department of science, which since the middle of the eighteenth century have made the country of Burns and Scott, of Hume and Adam Smith, of Black and Hunter and Hutton and Lyell, illustrious for all future time. Now this period of magnificent intellectual fruition in Scotland was preceded by a period of Calvinistic orthodoxy quite as rigorous as that of ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... knew this movement and its varied struggles to better the status of labor is shown in his book, "The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844." How thoroughly and fundamentally Marx later came to know not only the actual working-class movement, but every economic theory from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill, and every insurgent economist and political theorist from William Godwin to Bronterre O'Brien, is shown in "Capital." In fact, not a single phase of insurgent thought seemed to escape Marx and Engels, nor any trace of revolt against the existing order, whether political ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... suppose, 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 |
