In regards to the price of commodities, the rise of wages operates as simple interest does, the rise of profit operates like compound interest. Our merchants and masters complain much of the bad effec...
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.
The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exe...
What can be added to the happiness of a man who is in health, out of debt, and has a clear conscience?
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 self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to t...
Resentment seems to have been given us by nature for a defense, and for a defense only! It is the safeguard of justice and the security of innocence.
Great ambition, the desire of real superiority, of leading and directing, seems to be altogether peculiar to man, and speech is the great instrument of ambition.
Man an animal that makes bargains.
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.
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives n...
Hatred and anger are the greatest poison to the happiness of a good mind. There is, in the very feeling of those passions, something harsh, jarring, and convulsive, something that tears and distracts...
No society can surely be flourishing and happy of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable.
Poor David Hume is dying fast, but with more real cheerfulness and good humor and with more real resignation to the necessary course of things, than any whining Christian ever dyed with pretended resi...
Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.
What can be added to the happiness of man who is in health out of debt and has a clear conscience?
Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality.
Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.
The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Avarice over-rates the difference between p...
The first thing you have to know is yourself. A man who knows himself can step outside himself and watch his own reactions like an observer.
To feel much for others and little for ourselves to restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections, constitute the perfection of human nature.