Nothing but the most exemplary morals can give dignity to a man of small fortune.
Corn is a necessary, silver is only a superfluity.
The world neither ever saw, nor ever will see, a perfectly fair lottery.
The proprietor of stock is necessarily a citizen of the world, and is not necessarily attached to any particular country.
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.
Secrets in manufactures are capable of being longer kept than secrets in trade.
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 Europe.
The ancient Egyptians had a superstitious antipathy to the sea; a superstition nearly of the same kind prevails among the Indians; and the Chinese have never excelled in foreign commerce.
Justice, however, never was in reality administered gratis in any country. Lawyers and attornies, at least, must always be paid by the parties; and, if they were not, they would perform their duty still worse than they actually perform it.
Upstart greatness is everywhere less respected than ancient greatness.
A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more; otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation.
In public, as well as in private expences, great wealth may, perhaps, frequently be admitted as an apology for great folly.
Men desire to have some share in the management of public affairs chiefly on account of the importance which it gives them.
Mercantile jealousy is excited, and both inflames, and is itself inflamed, by the violence of national animosity:...
Goods can serve many other purposes besides purchasing money, but money can serve no other purpose besides purchasing goods.
A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural.
It is not for its own sake that men desire money, but for the sake of what they can purchase with it.
By nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from a street porter, as a mastiff is from a greyhound.
Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production.
But though empires, like all the other works of men, have all hitherto proved mortal, yet every empire aims at immortality.