Adam Smith Quotes

Our Constitution and Bill of Rights guarantee to all our people the greatest freedom ever enjoyed by the public of any great nation. This system guarantees freedom of individual enterprise, freedom to own property, freedom to start one's own business and to operate it according to one's own judgment so long as the enterprise is honorable. The individual has power to produce beyond his needs, to provide savings for the future protection of himself and family. He can live where he wishes and pick any job he wants and select any educational opportunity

Property, the right to enjoy the fruits of one's labor, the right to work, to develop, to exercise one's faculties, according to one's own understanding, without the state intervening otherwise than by its protective action; this is what is meant by liberty

In fact, a fundamental interdependence exists between the personal right to liberty and the personal right to property.

In a market economy, the right to seek employment is fundamental … the issue goes beyond economy. It’s an issue of human rights.

A man’s right to his job transcends the right of private property.

The obligation to earn one's bread presumes the right to do so. A society that denies this right cannot be justified, nor can it attain social peace.

God, when He made man with wants, and rendered labour an indispensable resource, made the right of work the property of every individual in the world, and this property is the first, the most sacred, and the most imprescriptible of all kinds of property. We regard it as one of the first duties of our justice, and as one of the acts most of all worthy of our benevolence, to free our subjects from every infraction of that inalienable right of humanity.

The preservation of liberty, not the promotion of efficiency, is the primary justification for private property. Efficiency is a happy, though not accidental, by-product - and a most important by-product because liberty could not have survived if it had not also produced affluence.

There can be no liberty unless there is economic liberty.

Every individual should have both the right to join a union and the right to not join a union should they so choose. It's about basic human freedom.

Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself.

Ultimately property rights and personal rights are the same thing.

The individual's freedom to withhold personal service is basic to the constitutional concept of liberty. Without this freedom, working people would be at the total mercy of their employers, unable either to bargain effectively or to extricate themselves from an intolerable situation. Such a situation would make a mockery out of the fundamental right to pursue life, liberty and happiness....

Every attempt, by whatever authority, to fix a maximum of productive labor by a given worker in a given time is an unjust restriction upon his freedom and a limitation of his right to make the most of himself in order that he may rise in the scale of the social and economic order in which he lives.

Make no mistake. Without individual property, none are free.

Among inalienable rights was the right to pursue any lawful business or vocation.

Individuals do not derive from government their right to contract, but bring that right with them into society.... every man retains the right to acquire property, to dispose of that property according to his own judgment, and to pledge himself for a future act.

Liberty: Give to every man the fruit of his own labor -- the labor of his hands and of his brain.

There can be no freedom of trade where there is no freedom of man, for the first of all commodities to be exchanged is labour, and the freedom of man consists only in the exercise of the right to determine for himself in what manner his labour shall be employed, and how he will dispose of its products....

We know that freedom has many dimensions. It is the right of the man who tills the land to own the land; the right of the workers to join together to seek better conditions of labor; the right of businessmen to use ingenuity and foresight to produce and distribute without arbitrary interference in a truly competitive economy.

It is essential that the young people of this country learn to respect the right of every man and woman to seek his or her happiness with minimal interference from the government.

I believe that my theory is correct; for whatever be the question upon which I am arguing, whether it be religious, philosophical, political, or economical; whether it affects well-being, morality, equality, right, justice, progress, responsibility, property, labor, exchange, capital, wages, taxes, population, credit, or Government; at whatever point of the scientific horizon I start from, I invariably come to the same thing—the solution of the social problem is in liberty.

The right to work, I had assumed, was the most precious liberty that man possesses. Man has indeed as much right to work as he has to live, to be free, to own property.

Our economic freedom is founded on individual property rights; government should never be permitted to take those away.

Jobs mean freedom for workers to support their families.