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The Wealth of Nations quotes
14 quotes from The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. Source: Project Gutenberg e-text #3300 (public domain in the USA), the text this site’s reader shows. Each quote is copied exactly from that text and links to its passage in the reader; when this page was built, every quote was checked word for word against the reader’s text.
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.
Labour was the first price, the original purchase money that was paid for all things.
By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.
He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it.
Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is, in reality, instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.
Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, 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.
As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can, both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce maybe of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can.
It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labour, which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people.
The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.
No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.
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.
Among men, on the contrary, the most dissimilar geniuses are of use to one another; the different produces of their respective talents, by the general disposition to truck, barter, and exchange, being brought, as it were, into a common stock, where every man may purchase whatever part of the produce of other men’s talents he has occasion for.