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.

When the profits of trade happen to be greater than ordinary, over-trading becomes a general error both among great and small dealers.

The natural price, therefore, is, as it were, the central price, to which the prices of all commodities are continually gravitating.

Adventure upon all the tickets in the lottery, and you lose for certain; and the greater the number of your tickets the nearer your approach to this certainty.

The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers.

A merchant, it has been said very properly, is not necessarily the citizen of any particular country.

I am always willing to run some hazard of being tedious, in order to be sure that I am perspicuous; and, after taking the utmost pains that I can to be perspicuous, some obscurity may still appear to remain upon a subject, in its own nature extremely abstracted.