The interest of [businessmen] is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public ... The proposal of any new law or ….

The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals would not only load himself with most un….

But though empires, like all the other works of men, have all hitherto proved mortal, yet every empire aims at immortality..

Nothing is more graceful than habitual cheerfulness..

A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation.Most government is by the rich for the rich. Gov….

That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that the contempt, of which….

It is the interest of every man to live as much at his ease as he can; and if his emoluments are to be precisely the same, whether he does or does no….

To expect, indeed, that the freedom of trade should ever be entirely restored in Great Britain, is as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia sh….

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

Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command. It is his own adva….

In ease of body, peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly upon a level and the beggar who suns himself by the side of the highway, p….

The value of any commodity, therefore, to the person who possesses it, and who means not to use or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other c….

The man who barely abstains from violating either the person, or the estate, or the reputation of his neighbours, has surely very little positive mer….

Now many such things may be done without intitling the people to rise in arms. A gross, flagrant, and palpable abuse no doubt will do it, as if they ….

The emotions of the spectator will still be very apt to fall short of the violence of what is felt by the sufferer. Mankind, though naturally sympath….

The retinue of a grandee in China or Indostan accordingly is, by all accounts, much more numerous and splendid than that of the richest subjects of E….

A gardener who cultivates his own garden with his own hands, unites in his own person the three different characters, of landlord, farmer, and labour….

To hinder, besides, the farmer from selling his goods at all times to the best market, is evidently to sacrifice the ordinary laws of justice to an i….

I am always willing to run some hazard of being tedious, in order to be sure that I am perspicuous; and, after taking the utmost pains that I can to ….

Great nations are never impoverished by private, though they sometimes are by public prodigality and misconduct..

That this is the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others, that it is by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either….