Adam Smith
Scottish · 1723–1790
Scottish economist and moral philosopher, author of The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, widely regarded as the father of modern economics.
Wikipedia ↗“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”
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“The man of system is apt to be very wise in his own conceit, and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.”
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“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
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“Every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”
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“No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.”
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“The division of labour, so far as it can be introduced, occasions, in every art, a proportionable increase of the productive powers of labour.”
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