"Adam Smith" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of that science that labour is the principal producer of capital. Everybody admitted that the crying want of Ireland was the want of capital; yet here is a Minister, holding in his hands her destinies during a life-and-death struggle for existence, and an ardent disciple of Adam Smith besides, expressing his belief that to expend in useless and even pernicious works the labour of half a million of men was a matter of secondary importance; and because it was, he did not attach any great ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... two metals form the money of the most civilised nations, need not be gone into here at any length. 'Their qualities of utility, beauty, and scarcity,' says Adam Smith, 'are the original foundation of the high price of those metals, or of the great quantity of other goods for which they can everywhere be exchanged. This value was antecedent to, and independent of, their being ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... as is usual on these points, vehemently threw themselves into an opposite direction; but they perhaps advanced too far in converting the Sabbath-day into a sullen and gloomy reserve of pharisaical austerity. Adam Smith, and Paley, in his "Moral and Political Philosophy," vol. ii. p. 73, have taken more enlightened views on ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... exchange 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 inheritance. Starting from ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... I were asked to sum up in a sentence the difference and the connection (between the two schools) I would say that the Manchester men were the disciples of Adam Smith and Bentham, while the Philosophical Radicals followed Bentham and Adam Smith" (F. W. Hirst, The Manchester School, Introd., p. xi). Lord Morley, in the concluding chapter of his Life of Cobden, points out that it was the view of "policy as a whole" in connection with the economic movement ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... the lively picture it gives us of the manners and customs of the North in the twelfth century; the state of the arts and the amount of science known to the educated. It abounds in sound morals, and its author might have sate at the feet of Adam Smith for the orthodoxy of his political economy. He is not entirely free from the credulity of his age and his account of Ireland will match anything to be found in Sir John Mandeville. Here we are told of an island on which nothing rots, of another on which ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... is baring his breast to rush on the 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
... 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 ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... foreign policy, Danton was more than a sane—he was a just, and even a diplomatic man. He was fond of wide reading, and his reading was of the philosophers; it ranged from Rabelais to the physiocrats in his own tongue, from Adam Smith to the Essay on Civil Government in that of strangers; and of the Encyclopaedia he possessed all the numbers steadily accumulated. When we consider the time, his fortune, and the obvious personal interest in so small and individual a ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... his first essay on population in 1798, a modest pamphlet, which fed so voraciously on the criticism supplied to it, that it developed into a mighty contribution to a great social problem, second only in time and in honour to the work of his great predecessor in economic studies, Adam Smith. ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... the discovery of a friend, that he had kept it in his possession three weeks before he could collect sufficient intellectual desire to cut open the pages! The neglect of this nobleman reduced the poet to a state of despondency. This patron was a political economist, the pupil of Adam Smith! It is pleasing to add, in contrast with this frigid Scotch patron, that when Mickle went to Lisbon, where his translation had long preceded his visit, he found the Prince of Portugal waiting on the quay to be the first to receive the translator of his great national ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... basketful, 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 Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... High Priests, presents, especially from the ecclesiastical point of view, a fresh survey of the history during the Greek and Maccabean periods. The geographical background may be studied either in George Adam Smith's Historical Geography of the Holy Land or in ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... 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 of labor, would be able ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... 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 himself, and enable old ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... Corneille, Racine, Boileau, Moliere,—but the age was fruitful in great critics, historians, philosophers, economists, poets, and novelists, who won immortal fame, like Pope, Goldsmith, Johnson, Addison, Gibbon, Bentley, Hume, Robertson, Priestley, Burke, Adam Smith, in England; Klopstock, Goethe, Herder, Schiller, Lessing, Handel, Schlegel, Kant, in Germany; and Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Marmontel, D'Alembert, Montesquieu, Rollin, Buffon, Lavoisier, Raynal, Lavater, in France,—all of whom were remarkable men, casting their fearless ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... 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
... 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 wench ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... had laid before George the Third unanswerable reasons for abolishing the Test Act. The enemies of free trade called themselves Pittites, though Pitt was far more deeply imbued with the doctrines of Adam Smith than either Fox or Grey. The very negro-drivers invoked the name of Pitt, whose eloquence was never more conspicuously displayed than when he spoke of the wrongs of the negro. This mythical Pitt, who resembles the genuine Pitt as little as Charlemagne of Ariosto resembles the Charlemagne ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... establishment in Manila, and to direct their 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 ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... consequence 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 ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... the literary spunk-seller. He was a wizened, shivering old man, often bare-footed, wearing at the best a thin ragged coat that had been black but was green-brown with age, and he made his spunks as well as sold them. He brought Bacon and Adam Smith into Thrums, and he loved to recite long screeds from Spenser, with a running commentary on the versification and the luxuriance of the diction. Of Jamie's death I do not care to write. He went without many a dinner in order to ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... 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
... determination to close his empire against the entrance of all liberal or progressive ideas, political, religious, and scientific, of Western Europe. A rigid censorship of the press is being maintained (1889), and the writings of such authors as Huxley, Spencer, Agassiz, Lyell, and Adam Smith, are forbidden circulation. ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... kitchen—and beyond; the food on the table—have so much, and no 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 of ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... 1756, Raeburn was not too late to paint many of the most gifted of the older generation. David Hume, who sat to Ramsay more than once, was dead before the new light rose above the horizon, and the appearance of Adam Smith does not seem to be recorded except in a Tassie medallion; but Black, the father of modern chemistry, and Hutton, the originator of modern geology, were amongst his early sitters; and fine works in a more mature manner ...
— Raeburn • James L. Caw
... 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; Congreve, in red morocco, ...
— Old Valentines - A Love Story • Munson Aldrich Havens
... value is given forth, one that is all the greater on account of its simplicity, people seem to be naturally disposed to underrate the power which gave it utterance. Booker Washington may merely be following in the footsteps of Adam Smith when, instead of regarding the negro population as an evil or a grievance, he prescribes that their labour, as a source of vast wealth, be utilised for the national advancement. Viewed from any other standpoint, there can be no doubt that the rapidly-increasing negroes inspire some disquieting ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike
... by an aged member of Parliament to Kropotkin some years ago, and the present elections testify strongly to the truth of that remark. For a country which produced the father of political economy, Adam Smith—for Scotland is included in our generalization—Robert Owen, the father of libertarian Socialism, which in the forties stood almost at the head of the Socialist movement in Europe, which has been the scene of so many Socialist and workingmen's congresses and has furnished ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... of facts. Nothing came out as it should. In principle, according to figures, any one could set up or pull down a society. One could frame no sort of satisfactory answer to the constructive doctrines of Adam Smith, or to the destructive criticisms of Karl Marx or to the anarchistic imprecations of Elisee Reclus. One revelled at will in the ruin of every society in the past, and rejoiced in proving the prospective overthrow of every society that seemed possible in ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... stated that in the old Protectionist theory, destroyed by Adam Smith, gold was considered to be wealth. Hence, if an individual bought foreign wheat for gold, the English suffered a national loss of wealth, and the foreign nation made a national gain. It is unnecessary to occupy space in refuting this ...
— Speculations from Political Economy • C. B. Clarke
... identification of the person with the individual presenting the copy and yet 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 ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... 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, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... I did, however, have secret dips into a political economy book, for I thought if the examiners shared my opinion they would wonder how little of this subject I knew. I couldn't keep away from the wretched thing, try as I would, and was always reading "Adam Smith" and "Walker" at odd moments. I think my nerves ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... John P. Jones, David Hume, William Huskisson, Sir James Graham, Prof. Torrens, Prof. Sidgwick, J. R. McCulloch, Mr. Gallatin, Prof. Fawcett, Prof. Perry, N. A. Nicholson, Earl Grey, Prof. Shield Nicholson, Lord Overstone, and, in fact, by all writers on political economy of any prominence since Adam Smith. Formerly it was supposed that the value of money depended upon the cost of production; that the reason why a dollar in gold or silver was worth 100 cents was because it took 100 cents' worth of labor to produce metal enough to make a dollar. ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... brown cloth great coat, with pockets which might have almost held the two volumes of his folio dictionary; and he carried in his hand a large English oak stick. Let me not be censured for mentioning such minute particulars. Every thing relative to so great a man is worth observing. 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. When I mention the oak stick, it is but letting Hercules have his club; and, by-and-by, my readers will find this stick will ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... 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 ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... could not now be applied to the free nation of the United States. Moreover, the mercantilist theory, having in this case produced such unfortunate results, henceforth began to lose ground, and it is not without interest that Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, the classic expression of the new political economy of free trade,—of laisser-faire, as the French styled it,—which was destined to supplant mercantilism, was published in 1776, the very year of the declaration of American independence. Of course Great Britain's mercantilist ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... men unconnected 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 writers in Scotland. He was then conducting a periodical called the Lounger, which was ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... of value, from the oxen that measured the value of the armor of Homeric heroes to the beautifully engraved promise of our day; but this would only be the hundred-times-told tale which every student may find recorded, not only in schoolbooks, but in the writings of Humboldt, Chevalier, Adam Smith, and others of the most advanced scientific authorities. They all recognize the precious metals as the universal standard of value. Neither governments, nor parliaments, nor congresses can change this law. It defies every form of authority, but silently and surely asserts itself ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... these two, only tends to confirm the 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 their destinies to a phantasmic ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... Wexford, Waterford, Cork, and Limerick were all built by the Danes. But a foundation had to be laid, and Froude felt bound also to make it clear that he did not take the old Whig view of Government as a necessary evil, or swear by the "dismal science" of Adam Smith. ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... upper hand in the early years of Charles Albert's reign. He described himself as vegetating, but he was not idle; sustained mental activity was, in fact, a necessity to him whatever were his outward circumstances. He read Bentham and Adam Smith, and was excited by the events going on in England, then in the throes of the first Reform Bill. It was in the fortress of Bard that he gained a grasp of English politics which he never lost, and which hardly another foreigner ever possessed in a like degree. By chance he became acquainted ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... 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 ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... 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 ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... 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 ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... they would feed you with Mere talks on Temperance: when your spirit's wings Would soar to Sociology alone, Whereby will come that blessed state of things When none has property to call his own, They give you—Adam Smith . . . These too are fall'n: ah me, that I should live To hear our brightest Radicals and best By angry Labour in such terms addressed As might apply to ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... land-sharks, who swarmed at that time the Yarra Yarra wharfs. Five pounds 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 ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... of the life of Adam Smith is still the memoir which Dugald Stewart read to the Royal Society of Edinburgh on two evenings of the winter of 1793, and which he subsequently published as a separate work, with many additional illustrative notes, in 1810. Later biographers have made few, if any, fresh contributions ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... 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 ...
— Direct Legislation by the Citizenship through the Initiative and Referendum • James W. Sullivan
... 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. I have always been a warm advocate for colonisation. It appears ...
— A Winter Tour in South Africa • Frederick Young
... in his father's absence a Templar stopped to have his horse shod. Dickon could shoe horses as well as anybody. But when the knight wished a bit of repairing done on his helmet it was beyond the lad's knowledge, and the work had to wait until old Adam Smith came back from Lewes. ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... Sam often in the next month. It had occurred to Sam senior that Adam Smith might cure the boy's taste for 'bosh'; so, by his father's orders, his Sunday afternoons were devoted to The Wealth of Nations. As for his evenings, his grandfather took possession of them. Benjamin ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... 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 New England. The ministers of the Scotch Kirk in the ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... 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 ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... English forerunners; in the middle ages Occam and Duns Scotus, in the eighteenth century Berkeley and Hume. In his moral philosophy, as we shall see later, he is an adherent of the school which is represented by Hutcheson, Hume and Adam Smith. Because he is no philosopher in the stricter sense of the term, it is of great interest to see that his attitude of mind is that of the ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... later became Lord Chatham (S538), was one of the warmest friends that America had; but he openly advocated this narrow policy, saying that if British interests demanded it he would not permit the colonists to make so much as a "horseshoe nail." Adam Smith, an eminent English political economist of that day, vehemently condemned the British Government's colonial mercantile system as suicidal; but his condemnation came too late to have any effect. The fact was that the world was not ready then—if indeed it ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... late eighteenth century being a crucial point in the gradual shift from absolute classical standards to the relative approaches of the next age. Most of the important thinkers of the day—Hume, Burke, Lord Kames, Adam Smith, among others—were thinking deeply about the problem of taste. And if Miss Reynolds' essay is not one of the most perceptive of the discussions, it is at least ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste, and of the Origin of - our Ideas of Beauty, etc. • Frances Reynolds
... let you see these verses from an Ode to the Cuckoo written by one of the ministers of Leith in the middle of last century—the palmy days of Edinburgh—who was a friend of Hume and Adam Smith and the whole constellation. The authorship of these beautiful verses has been most truculently fought about; but whoever wrote them (and it seems as if this Logan had) ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... be derived, because the industrial slave, given an equal opportunity to produce for himself, would not produce for another. On the other hand the large industrial operations, with the multitude of laborers from which Adam Smith declares employers grow rich, as far as this applies to the soil, would not be possible, since the vast volume of increased production brought about by the industry of the multitude of co-equal small farmers would so reduce the cost price of food products as to destroy the incentive to ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... 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, ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... was not such an accomplished artificer in a particular direction as his town brethren in the trades. But he was, in truth, like that clumsy pin-maker who made the whole pin, and who was despised by Adam Smith on that account and respected by Macaulay, ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... smattering of principles is too often found in the place of practice. How can this order of things be improved but by setting forth duties as innocent pleasures, sweetening utility with entertainment, and garnishing fact with fancy. A man need not study Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations to become rich, nor seek the glories of nature in artificial Systems. But the contrary notion has probably given rise to the observation, that, "what the present generation have gained in head, they have lost in heart." It should not, however, be so, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - No. 555, Supplement to Volume 19 • Various
... against metropolitan attractions. In the last half of the eighteenth century, such philosophical activity as existed in the country seemed to have taken refuge in the northern half of the island. A set of brilliant young men, living in a society still proud of the reputation of Hume, Adam Smith, Reid, Robertson, Dugald Stewart, and other northern luminaries, might naturally be susceptible to the stimulus of literary ambition. In politics the most rampant Conservatism, rendered bitter by the recent experience of the French Revolution, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... them in 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 Bible and The Westminster Confession, Bunyan and Baxter and Fox's Book of Martyrs, ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... waiting for monographs from the research of the laboratory is to have lost a sense of the rhythm of actual affairs. That is not the way things come about: we grow into a new point of view: only afterwards, in looking back, do we see the landmarks of our progress. Thus it is customary to say that Adam Smith dates the change from the old mercantilist economy to the capitalistic economics of the nineteenth century. But that is a manner of speech. The old mercantilist policy was giving way to early industrialism: ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... 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 ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... security and precision to the efforts of the manufacturer. And the inventions connected with the steam-engine, at the same time that they have greatly diminished labour of body, have tended to increase power of mind and intellectual resources. Adam Smith well observes that manufacturers are always more ingenious than husbandmen; and manufacturers who use machinery will probably always be found more ingenious than handicraft manufacturers. You spoke of porcelain as a result of accident; the improvements invented in this country, as ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... by the effect of what Adam Smith calls the higgling of the market, 10 yards of cloth, in both countries, exchange for 17 ...
— Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... Adam Smith, in his Book of the Twelve Prophets, comes to this great passage in Micah, he prints it in ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... In 1770 the printing-house was removed from Blackfriars to New Street, near Gough Square, Fleet Street. William Strahan was intimately associated with the best literature of his time, among those for whom he published being Dr. Johnson, Hume, Adam Smith, Robertson, and many other eminent writers. In 1774 he was Master of the Stationers' Company, Member of Parliament for Malmesbury, and sat for Wootton Bassett in the next Parliament. Among his greatest friends was Benjamin Franklin, who ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... peaceful. 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 natural process by ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... in connection with the six heads mentioned as governing the present efficiency of labor, the five enumerated by Adam Smith in his summary of causes for differences in wages: 1. "The agreeableness or disagreeableness of the employments themselves. 2. The easiness and cheapness, or the difficulty and expense of learning them. 3. The constancy or inconstancy of employment in them. 4. The small or great trust which ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... 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 ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... industry, it may be considered as the representative of that industry. In the first case, a bushel of wheat will be represented by one dollar; in the second, by two dollars. This is well explained by Hume, and seems admitted by Adam Smith, (B. 2. c. 2. 436, 441, 490.) But where a nation is in a full course of interchange of wants and supplies with all others, the proportion of its medium to its produce is no longer indifferent, (lb. 441.) To trade on equal terms, the common measure of values should be as nearly as possible on a par ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... began to impress the popular imagination. But great thinkers had long recognised the necessity of applying scientific method in the sphere of social and political investigation. Two men especially illustrate the tendency and the particular turn which it took in England. Adam Smith's great book in 1776 applied scientific method to political economy. Smith is distinguished from his French predecessors by the historical element of his work; by his careful study, that is, of economic history, and his consequent presentation of his theory not as a body of absolute ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... wires could be laid underground, or suspended overhead, connecting by branch wires with private dwellings, shops, etc., and uniting them through the main cable with a central office." This remarkable prophecy has now become stale reading, as stale as Darwin's "Origin of Species," or Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations." But at the time that it was written it was a most ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... in which we move; and the soldier discharged his duty in the hour of danger, in the hope of rendering his life more happy in the esteem of his officers and comrades. 'Every tolerably good soldier feels ', says Adam Smith, 'that he would become the scorn of his companions if he should be supposed capable of shrinking from danger, or of hesitating either to expose or to throw away his life, when the good of the service required it.' So thought the philosopher-King of Prussia, when he let his regiments ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... many essential respects the American government is moving to-day along the lines which he was the first to mark out. As an economist he shared to some extent in the shortcomings of the age which preceded Adam Smith, but in the special department of finance he has been equalled by no other American statesman save Albert Gallatin. He was a splendid orator and brilliant writer, an excellent lawyer, and a clear-headed and industrious student of political history. He was also eminent as a political leader, ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... 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 ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... among the literary and academic centres of Great Britain. The principal of the university was William Robertson, the {7} celebrated historian. Professor Dugald Stewart, who held the chair of philosophy, had gained a reputation extending to the continent of Europe. Adam Smith, the epoch-making economist, was spending the closing years of his life at his home near the Canongate churchyard. During his stay in Edinburgh, Thomas Douglas interested himself in the work of the literary societies, which were among the leading features ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood
... together and get them laughing you can do anything you like with them. Once they start to laugh they are lost. So they got Mr. Dreery, the English Literature teacher at the high school, to give an evening of readings from the Great Humorists from Chaucer to Adam Smith. They came mighty near to making a barrel of money out of that. If the people had once started laughing it would have been all over with them. As it was I heard a lot of them say that they simply wanted to scream with laughter: they said they just felt like bursting into peals of laughter all the ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... a large item to enter under this head to the account of that enterprising caterer of good and cheap books, Mr. Bohn. We have two volumes of his Standard Library, namely, Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments; and Dissertation on the Origin of Languages, with the Biographical and Critical Memoir of the Author, by Dugald Stewart—and a work of greater present interest, though ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... of Waldershare was to transform him not only into a Tory, but one of the old rock, a real Jacobite. "Is not the Tory party," Waldershare would exclaim, "a succession of heroic spirits, 'beautiful and swift,' ever in the van, and foremost of their age?—Hobbes and Bolingbroke, Hume and Adam Smith, Wyndham and Cobham, Pitt and Grenville, Canning and Huskisson?—Are not the principles of Toryism those popular rights which men like Shippen and Hynde Cotton flung in the face of an alien monarch and his mushroom aristocracy?—Place bills, triennial bills, opposition ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth." It is the most startling novel and original book of the last twenty years, and if I mistake not will in the future rank as making an advance in political and social science equal to that made by Adam Smith ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... greatly increased output rendered possible by the use of machinery and division of labor is given by the distinguished Scotch economist, Adam Smith, whose great work, The Wealth of Nations, appeared in 1776. Speaking of the manufacture of a pin in his own time, Adam Smith says: "To make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business, to whiten the pin ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... influences, which led Gibbon first to Rome, and then to skepticism, proved no doubt to the average mind a mere narcotic to all spiritual life. Gibbon is not the only great writer who has recorded his testimony against Hanoverian Oxford. Adam Smith in that work which has been called, with pardonable exaggeration, "the most important book that ever was written," the "Wealth of Nations," has, in the following remarks on universities, evidently incorporated his anything but loving recollections ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... copyright, except for the 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. They could expect no pecuniary ...
— Letters on International Copyright; Second Edition • Henry C. Carey
... picture. All the arbitrators agreed that this was monstrous, whereupon I contended that if they denied my right to the value in exchange, they must admit my right to the value in use. They assented to this after putting off their decision for a fortnight in order to read Adam Smith and discover what on earth I meant by my values in use and exchange. I now showed that the picture had no value in use to me, as I disliked it, and that therefore I was entitled to nothing, and that Brown must take ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... the year 1750 Adam Smith was appointed professor of logic and, being rather unexpectedly called to discharge the duties of his office he found it necessary to read to his pupils in the English language, a course of lectures ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... 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
... and the Irish Parliament represented not the whole people but only that one section of it which was necessarily bound to the English connection; the Irish petitions for Union therefore remained unheeded. The great Bishop Berkeley, writing in 1735, strongly advocated a union; at a later time Adam Smith wrote: "By a union with Great Britain Ireland would gain besides the freedom of trade other advantages much more important ... Without a union with Great Britain the inhabitants of Ireland are not likely for many ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... very soon. I only wish to give Dr. Adam Smith one other perusal, which I will do ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... scattered home production of the country and its villages. In the wake of the new inventions economic science stepped in, and, scrupulously obeying its own law of demand and supply, told the then predominant middle classes just what they wished to be told. Adam Smith had made the wonderful discovery that money and wealth were not the same thing. Then Ricardo, and after him the Manchester School of economists, made division of labour the cardinal virtue in the new gospel of wealth. In order to give full play ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... which are independent of external aids. In his solitude he meditated deeply on the philosophy of trade, and thought out by degrees a complete and admirable theory, substantially the same with that which, a century later, was expounded by Adam Smith. After an exile of many years, Dudley North returned to England with a large fortune, and commenced business as a Turkey merchant in the City of London. His profound knowledge, both speculative and practical, of commercial matters, and the perspicuity and liveliness with which he explained ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... investigating this subject, Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), an Episcopal clergyman, announced his famous proposition, since known as the Malthusian theorem, that population tends to increase faster than the means of subsistence. Political economists and philosophers like Adam Smith (1723-1790), professor in the University of Glasgow, agreed on the "let-alone" doctrine of government. They held that individuals could succeed best when least interfered with by government, that a government could ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... 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 ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... 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 or black, has equalled in the same situation.... He could produce any one of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... her from farther absurd exclamations by turning to the title-page of the book and showing her the words "Adam Smith." ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... thought manners and morals had improved 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 ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... 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 ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... 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 you a little too far—over the hedge, in fact. It carried me a good ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... 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 of ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... has actually to build must bear in mind many things never noticed by D'Alembert and Euler, so must he who has actually to govern be perpetually guided by considerations to which no allusion can be found in the writings of Adam Smith or Jeremy Bentham. The perfect lawgiver is a just temper between the mere man of theory, who can see nothing but general principles, and the mere man of business, who can see nothing but particular circumstances. Of lawgivers in whom the speculative element has prevailed to the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... he had returned from the continent (in June, 1766,) he again visited his native country, where he had the satisfaction to find his mother and sister still living. At Edinburgh he met with the two Humes, Robertson, Adam Smith, Blair, and Ferguson; but the bodily ailments, under which he was labouring, left him little power of enjoying the society of men who had newly raised their country to so much eminence in literature. To his friend, Dr. Moore, then ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... 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, [* The father of Economical Philosophy was, when a child, 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 habits of life, he readily undertook it, ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 universities. ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... in 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 character,"—his ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... 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, though ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... is 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
... 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 currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... bourgeoisie, on the other hand, is far better off under the present arrangement than under the old slave system; it can dismiss its employees at discretion without sacrificing invested capital, and gets its work done much more cheaply than is possible with slave labour, as Adam Smith comfortingly ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... 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 ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... Johnson—accepted with gentlemanly resignation by Pope—triumphantly and with bray of penny trumpets and blowing of steam-whistles, proclaimed for the glorious discovery of the civilised ages, by Mrs. Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Adam Smith, and Co. There is no God, but have we not invented gunpowder?—who wants a God, with that in his pocket?[179] There is no Resurrection, neither angel nor spirit; but have we not paper and pens, and cannot every blockhead print his opinions, and the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... that giant of our science, one of the greatest minds of which humanity can boast—Adam Smith. He restored the ancient wisdom of our ancestors, and also clearly and irrefutably demonstrated what they had only instinctively recognised—namely, that the increase of wealth depends upon the productiveness of human labour. But while he threw round this truth the enduring ramparts of his ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... domestication of man through countless generations, social instincts must have been established, which appear as moral dispositions. I recall the moral feeling in Shaftesbury. The social life of man, for instance, plays with Adam Smith a significant role, and yet even with him the moral law is not something ready from the very beginning, not an innate imperative, but the peculiar product of each individual. The development of conscience receives an interesting treatment by Smith. There takes place in us a natural transposition ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... makeing this Kingdom a Staple not only of the Commodities of those Plantations but also of the Commodities of other countries and places for the supplying of them, and it being the usage of other Nations to keep their [plantation] Trade to themselves." Adam Smith had raised a doubt as to the wisdom of the end. The American Revolution had raised a doubt as to the wisdom of the means. Yet, with significant changes, the old colonial system lasted for full ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... shrug our shoulders in acquiescence and proclaim greed and selfishness to be the very core of human nature, take it all for granted, and let it pass at that. We have gone so far in our degradation that the prophet of capitalistic principles, Adam Smith, in his famous Wealth of Nations, arrives at the laws of wealth, not from the phenomena of wealth nor from statistical statements, but from the phenomena of selfishness—a fact which shows how far-reaching in its dire influence ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... book upon morals that ever was written, for persons who do not care that what they read shall be scientifically true. Hume, who, by the way, had been invited by Helvetius to translate the book into English, wrote to Adam Smith that it was worth reading, not for its philosophy, which he did not highly value, but for its agreeable composition.[113] Helvetius intended that it should be this, and accordingly he stuffed it with stories and anecdotes. Many of them ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... of Shakespeare, Byron 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
... Such, in my opinion, was Peter the Hermit who started the Crusades. The wise men of the world lead only indirectly,—by a permeation of their thoughts, slowly, into the thought of the leaders of the race and from them downwards. Adam Smith exerted a great influence. But how many read his books? The leaders of thought did, and they extended his teachings into the community, but certainly not as Adam Smith taught. Christ made an upheaval in Jerusalem ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... such men as Guizot and Milman pronounced wonderful 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 ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... 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 ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... 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 ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... (1730-1792), fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, vice-Chancellor of the University (1776), Dean of Canterbury (1781), and Bishop of Norwich (1790). He was a great satirist, but most of his pamphlets against men like Adam Smith, Swedenborg, and Hume, were anonymous, as in the case of this one against Newton. He was so liberal in his attitude towards the Methodists that he would not have John Wesley forbidden to preach in his diocese. He was twenty-one ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... 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. In a general way, books are subject, like other merchandise, to the ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... the nation. In the University there were at that time, representative of the learning of the age, Dugald Stewart, Dr. Blair, and Dr. Robertson. David Hume was but recently dead, and the lustre of his name remained. His great friend, Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations, was still living; while Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling, the most popular writer of his day, was editing The Lounger; and Dr. Blacklock, the blind poet, was also a name of authority in the world ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... Shetland were first induced about the beginning of the eighteenth century to take the ling fishing into their own hands, supplying their tenants with materials, and receiving the fish at a stipulated rate.* The system which grew up after this change is referred to by Dr. Adam Smith,** and appears to have been in full vigour in at least one part of Shetland but a few years ago. It is thus described by a witness, William Stewart, as it existed till 1862 in Whalsay, where he was a tenant of the late Mr. ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... the Americans would make peace. The person chosen for this purpose was Richard Oswald, a Scotch merchant, who owned large estates in America,—a man of very frank disposition and liberal views, and a friend of Adam Smith. In April, Oswald had several conversations with Franklin. In one of these conversations Franklin suggested that, in order to make a durable peace, it was desirable to remove all occasion for future quarrel; that ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... 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 ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... and thought stronger and deeper. In manners and speech something of the brutalism which was at the root of the English character at the time began to colour the refinement of the preceding age. Dilettantism gave way to learning and speculation; in the place of Bolingbroke came Adam Smith; in the place of Addison, Johnson. In a way it is the solidest and sanest time in English letters. Yet in the midst of its urbanity and order forces were gathering for its destruction. The ballad-mongers ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair |
