To expect, indeed, that the freedom of trade should ever be entirely restored in Great Britain, is as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia should never be established in it.

Man is an animal that makes bargains: no other animal does this - no dog exchanges bones with another.

The great secret of education is to direct vanity to proper objects.

In this consists the difference between the character of a miser and that of a person of exact economy and assiduity. The one is anxious about small matters for their own sake; the other attends to them only in consequence of the scheme of life which he has laid down to himself.

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.

Beneficence is always free, it cannot be extorted by force.

The propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals.