No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.

It must always be remembered, however, that it is the luxuries, and not the necessary expense of the inferior ranks of people, that ought ever to be taxed.

Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.

With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches.

The liberal reward of labor, therefore, as it is the necessary effect, so it is the natural symptom of increasing national wealth. The scanty maintenance of the laboring poor, on the other hand, is the natural symptom that things are at a stand, and their starving condition that they going backwards fast.

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.

This is one of those cases in which the imagination is baffled by the facts.