Adam Smith Quotes

There are two forces in this and in every other nation of the world today. One force is the taker and the other force is the maker.

Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor.

In the struggle between capital and labor, more often than not capital has won, because the real source of value for most companies has historically been the hard assets that they owned and controlled.

It is essential that there be organization of labor…. Capital organizes and therefore labor must organize.

There is no way of keeping profits up but by keeping wages down.

… the struggle of men to outvie one another in production is beneficial to the community; their struggle over the division of the joint produce is not. The stronger side will dictate its own terms; and as a matter of fact, in the early days of competition, the capitalists used all their power to oppress the laborers, and drove down wages to starvation point. This kind of competition has to be checked; there is no historical instance of its having lasted long without being modified either by combination or legislation, or both. In England both remedies are in operation, the former through Trades Unions, the latter through factory legislation.

The insurance companies use their economic power to grind down working people..

The difference between capitalism and feudalism is that under capitalism, they make money directly through wages, manufacturing, and commerce and under feudalism, it's directly through juro-political means.

the most powerful bodies in the world, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, are also the least democratic and inclusive.

Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this triumph is only the prelude to the triumph of labour over capital.

He who before was the money owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labor-power follows as his laborer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other hesitant, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but a hiding.

Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange, and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.

The economic owning class is always the political ruling class.

The idea that high wages equals low employment, it's absurd.

For us the national flag is a rag to be planted on a dunghill. There are only two fatherlands in the world: that of the exploited and that of the exploiters.

You had workers' movements. You had left organizations, the Communist Party, that were mobilizing in profoundly powerful ways to basically address the great injustices of capitalism.

The world is made of stairs, and there are those who go up and those who go down.

Can anything be imagined more abhorrent to every sentiment of generosity and justice, than the law which arms the rich with the legal right to fix, by assize, the wages of the poor? If this is not slavery, we have forgotten its definition. Strike the right of associating for the sale of labor from the privileges of a freeman, and you may as well bind him to a master, or ascribe him to the soil.

A cigar makers organization once said that I was the most famous cigar smoker in the world. I dont know if thats true, but once while visiting Havana, I went to a cigar factory. There were four hundred people there rolling cigars, and when they saw me, they all stood up and applauded.

I think the world is in the mess it's in because we are spiritually ignorant.

The poor yield to the rich, the common people to the upper ten, the servants to their masters, the ignorant to the scholars; but there is nobody who does not imagine that he is really better than others.

Thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it.

It's often said that the Democrats fight 'for the little guy.' That's true: liberals fight to make sure the little guy stays little! Think about it. What if all the little guys were to prosper and become big guys? Then what? Who would liberals pretend to fight for? If the bamboozlers fight for anything, it's to ensure that the little guy stays angry at those nasty conservatives who are holding him down.

A general flat minimum-wage law for all industry is permissible, but I do not think that it is a particularly wise method of achieving the end. I know much better methods of providing a minimum for everybody. But once you turn from laying down a general minimum for all industry to decreeing particular and different minimum for different industries, then, of course, you make the price mechanism inoperative, because it is no longer the price mechanism which will guide people between industries and trades.

When everything has its proper place in our minds, we are able to stand in equilibrium with the rest of the world.