By pursuing his own interest (the individual) frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.

Adam Smith
Some Similar Quotes
  1. The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal,... - Karl Marx

  2. If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then... - Herbert Marcuse

  3. Latter-day capitalism. Like it or not, it's the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there's fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. <span style="margin:15px; display:block"></span>Within fashionable good, there's formal and then... - Haruki Murakami

  4. The justification of capitalism is not that the economy grows faster than it grows under any other system. . not that the goods pour forth. The justification of capitalism is that it is the only economic system consistent with the requirements of man's rational nature,... - M. Northrup Buechner

  5. What happens to people living in a society where everyone in power is lying, stealing, cheating and killing, and in our hearts we all know this, but the consequences of facing all these lies are so monstrous, we keep on hoping that maybe the corporate... - Inga Muscio

More Quotes By Adam Smith
  1. Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

  2. 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 poverty and riches: ambition, that between a private and a public station: vain-glory, that between...

  3. There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.

  4. Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.

  5. Public services are never better performed than when their reward comes only in consequence of their being performed, and is proportioned to the diligence employed in performing them.

Related Topics