Notice that tearing oneself out of the insensible state is the opposite of remaining in it; the man who is beneficent from duty nevertheless acts with feelings, if not with empirical inclinations.

Consequentialist theories pretend that we can set some great big ends (the general happiness, human flourishing), provide ourselves with definite enough conceptions of them to make them the objects of instrumental reasoning, and then obtain enough reliable information about what actions will best promote them that we could regulate our conduct by these considerations alone.

Some empirical feelings, such as sympathy, are indispensable parts of certain moral virtues.

It is a cause of shame to any member of the human race to be a member of the same species some of whose members could vote for any candidate for president that has been offered by the Republican party. Such people seem to be motivated only by short-sighted greed, ignorance, fear and hatred.

Marx's own illusion was to think that the working class movement, which he devoted his life to creating and strengthening, would both be socially and politically successful in the industrial nations of Western Europe, and that it would develop an entirely new way of human social life that would retain and even enhance the productive benefits of capitalism while overcoming the inhumanity and exploitation of capitalist social relations. Marx himself had no solutions to these problems. His object of study was capitalism itself.

Smith could not be expected to have anticipated the horrors that were to come. But even in his own time, he was a defender of certain state actions that he thought necessary in order to safeguard the good effects of commercial society (Smith did not speak of 'capitalism' and was acquainted only with an early undeveloped form of it). Among these state actions the chief was general public education.

There is a lot in Adam Smith that reflects the insights of Rousseau and anticipates those of Marx.