Frases de Adam Smith

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“No hay arte que un gobierno aprenda antes de otro que el de extraer dinero de los bolsillos de la gente.”

“No es por la benevolencia del carnicero, del cervecero y del panadero que podemos contar con nuestra cena, sino por su propio interés.”

“No puede haber una sociedad floreciente y feliz cuando la mayor parte de sus miembros son pobres y desdichados.”

“Si abordas una situación como asunto de vida o muerte, morirás muchas veces.”

“En realidad, la atracción o el afecto no son más que simpatía de la costumbre.”

“Rechaza específicamente las intervenciones particulares del Estado para fomentar tal o cual actividad, para proteger tal o cual sector en mayor beneficio de la comunidad. El argumento que emplea es profundamente práctico: el Estado no sabe cómo hacerlo.”

“La ciencia es el gran antídoto contra el veneno del entusiasmo y la superstición.”

“Propone enriquecer tanto al pueblo como al soberano.”

“Los bienes pueden servir para muchos otros propósitos además de comprar dinero, pero el dinero no puede servir para ningún otro propósito además de comprar bienes.”

“Though the principles of the banking trade may appear somewhat abstruse, the practice is capable of being reduced to strict rules. To depart upon any occasion from these rules, in consequence of some flattering speculation of extraordinary gain, is almost always extremely dangerous, and frequently fatal to the banking company which attempts it.”

“The man who esteems himself as he ought, and no more than he ought, seldom fails to obtain from other people all the esteem that he himself thinks due. He desires no more than is due to him, and he rests upon it with complete satisfaction.”

“What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.”

“The importation of gold and silver is not the principal, much less the sole benefit which a nation derives from its foreign trade.”

“In the long-run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him, but the necessity is not so immediate.”

“It appears, accordingly, from the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves.”

“It is unjust that the whole of society should contribute towards an expence of which the benefit is confined to a part of the society.”

“The education of the common people requires, perhaps, in a civilized and commercial society, the attention of the public more than that of people of some rank and fortune.”

“But bounty and hospitality very seldom lead to extravagance; though vanity almost always does.”

“The man who employs either his labour or his stock in a grater variety of ways than his situation renders necessary, can never hurt his neighbour by underselling him. He may hurt himself, and he generally does so. Jack of all trades will never be rich, says the proverb. But the law ought always to trust people with the care of their own interest, as in their local situations they must generally be able to judge better of it than the legislator can do.”

“The liberal reward of labour, therefore, as it is the affect of increasing wealth, so it is the cause of increasing population. To complain of it, is to lament over the necessary effect and cause of the greatest public prosperity.”

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

“Hatred and anger are the greatest poison to the happiness of a good mind.”

“When the act of navigation was made, though England and Holland were not actually at war, the most violent animosity subsisted between the two nations. … It is not impossible, therefore, that some of the regulations of this famous act may have proceeded from national animosity. They are as wise, however, as if they had all been dictated by the most deliberate wisdom. National animosity at that particular time aimed at the very same object which the most deliberate wisdom would have recommended, the diminution of the naval power of Holland, the only naval power which could endanger the security of England.”

“China is a much richer country than any part of Europe.”

“The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition, when suffered to exert itself with freedom and security is so powerful a principle that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often incumbers its operations; though the effect of these obstructions is always more or less either to encroach upon its freedom, or to diminish its security.”

“For in every country of the world, I believe, the avarice and injustice of princes and sovereign states, abusing the confidence of their subjects, have by degrees diminished the real quantity of metal, which had been originally contained in their coins.”

“The annual produce of the land and labour of any nation can be increased in its value by no other means, but by increasing either the number of its productive labourers, or the productive powers of those labourers who had before been employed.”

“The great affair, we always find, is to get money.”

“When profit diminishes, merchants are very apt to complain that trade decays; though the diminution of profit is the natural effect of its prosperity, or of a greater stock being employed in it than before.”

“When national debts have once been accumulated to a certain degree, there is scarce, I believe, a single instance of their having been fairly and completely paid. The liberation of the public revenue, if it has ever been brought about at all, has always been brought about by bankruptcy; sometimes by an avowed one, but always by a real one, though frequently by a pretend payment.”

“Monopoly of one kind or another, indeed, seems to be the sole engine of the mercantile system.”

“IV. Every tax ought to be contrived as both to take out and to keep out of the pockets of the people as little as possible, over and above what it brings into the public treasury of the state.”

“How many people ruin themselves by laying out money on trinkets of frivolous utility? What pleases these lovers of toys is not so much the utility, as the aptness of the machines which are fitted to promote it. All their pockets are stuffed with little conveniences. They contrive new pockets, unknown in the clothes of other people, in order to carry a greater number. They walk about loaded with a multitude of baubles, in weight and sometimes in value not inferior to an ordinary Jew's-box, some of which may sometimes be of some little use, but all of which might at all times be very well spared, and of which the whole utility is certainly not worth the fatigue of bearing the burden.”

“There seem, however, to be two cases in which it will generally be advantageous to lay some burden upon foreign, for the encouragement of domestic industry. The first is, when some particular sort of industry is necessary for the defence of the country. The defence of Great Britain, for example, depends very much upon the number of its sailors and shipping. The act of navigation, therefore, very properly endeavours to give the sailors and shipping of Great Britain the monopoly of the trade of their own country, in some cases, by absolute prohibitions, and in others by heavy burdens upon the shipping of foreign countries.”

“With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which in their eye is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves.”

“There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not, in this respect, possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving. Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind, than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the jails of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor of those which they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished.”

“This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and powerful, and to despise or, at least, neglect persons of poor and mean conditions, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”

“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.”