Adam Smith Biography Quotes 30 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Adam Smith was born in 1723 in the port town of Kirkcaldy, in Fife, Scotland. His father, also named Adam, was a customs official who died before his son's birth, and Smith was raised by his mother, Margaret Douglas, whose encouragement and frugal household shaped his temperament and habits. After schooling in Kirkcaldy, he entered the University of Glasgow as a teenager, studying under the celebrated moral philosopher Francis Hutcheson. Hutcheson's dynamic lectures and emphasis on benevolence and the moral sense left a lasting mark on Smith's intellectual outlook. In 1740 Smith won a Snell Exhibition to Balliol College, Oxford. His Oxford years were not happy ones; he later contrasted the sleepy pedagogy he encountered there with the vibrant intellectual life of Glasgow. He left without a degree and returned to Scotland determined to make his career as a man of letters.

Emergence as a Teacher and Philosopher
Back in Scotland, Smith entered the circle of the Scottish Enlightenment that included David Hume, Henry Home (Lord Kames), William Robertson, and Adam Ferguson. In 1748, with the sponsorship of Lord Kames, he began delivering public lectures in Edinburgh on rhetoric, jurisprudence, and political economy. In 1751 he was appointed Professor of Logic at the University of Glasgow, and the following year he moved to the Chair of Moral Philosophy, succeeding to the role in which Hutcheson had once taught. Smith thrived at Glasgow. His teaching covered ethics, natural jurisprudence, police and revenue (what we would now call political economy), and rhetoric. He also took part in the day-to-day life of the university, advising students and discussing ideas with colleagues such as the physician-chemist Joseph Black and the instrument maker James Watt, who was associated with the university's network.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments
In 1759 Smith published The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a work that secured his reputation across Britain. It explained how moral judgments arise from sympathy and from the standpoint of the impartial spectator, an internalized point of view by which people evaluate their own and others' conduct. The book was admired by many of Smith's contemporaries, including David Hume, with whom he maintained a close friendship. Smith revised The Theory of Moral Sentiments throughout his life, expanding it to address self-command, virtue, and the role of moral education, with a final edition appearing in 1790.

Travels and Intellectual Exchange
In 1764 Smith left Glasgow to become tutor to Henry Scott, the young Duke of Buccleuch, at the invitation of Charles Townshend. He resigned his professorship and spent nearly three years on the Continent with his pupil. Their travels took them to Toulouse and Paris, where Smith met leading French thinkers. The encounters with Francois Quesnay and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot were especially important. Quesnay's physiocracy, with its emphasis on the productive power of agriculture and the idea of a natural order, sharpened Smith's analysis of economic systems and his critique of mercantilism. Smith also discussed literature and science with figures in the Paris salons, carrying back to Scotland a broader perspective on commerce, taxation, and the interplay of policy and growth.

The Wealth of Nations
After returning to Britain, Smith spent years in Kirkcaldy composing his major work. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations appeared in 1776. Ranging across five books, it set out a systematic account of how markets, specialization, and incentives combine to raise productivity. The famous account of the division of labor illustrated how breaking tasks into simple steps could greatly expand output, and the analysis of market prices distinguished between transient movements and the long-run natural price governed by costs. Smith criticized trade restrictions and monopolies characteristic of the mercantile system, arguing that free exchange and competition tend to channel self-interest toward the public good. He nevertheless assigned the state clear duties: defense, justice, certain public works and institutions, and aspects of education where private provision would be inadequate. The book engaged with contemporaries and predecessors across Europe and was read with admiration by public figures such as Edmund Burke. It influenced debates over colonial policy, banking, and taxation in Britain and beyond.

Public Service and Later Years
The success of The Wealth of Nations drew Smith into public life. In 1778 he was appointed Commissioner of Customs in Scotland and settled in Edinburgh. The post suited a man raised in a customs household and gave him practical insight into the administration of trade and revenue. He continued revising his works while participating in the city's clubs and societies alongside friends such as Joseph Black, the geologist James Hutton, and the historian William Robertson. During this period he stood by David Hume during the latter's final illness and wrote a public letter defending Hume's character, a text that sparked controversy yet displayed Smith's loyalty. In 1787 he was elected Rector of the University of Glasgow, returning ceremonially to the institution that had shaped him. Smith died in Edinburgh in 1790 and was buried in the Canongate Kirkyard. Before his death he asked Black and Hutton, his literary executors, to destroy most of his unpublished manuscripts; they later oversaw the publication of a selection of surviving pieces as Essays on Philosophical Subjects. Dugald Stewart, a younger philosopher and admirer, soon offered an influential account of Smith's life and writings.

Character, Method, and Ideas
Smith's writings integrate moral psychology, jurisprudence, and political economy. In ethics, he traced morality to the social process of mutual spectatorship and the development of conscience rather than to rigid rules or mere self-interest. In jurisprudence and political economy, he probed the historical evolution of institutions such as property, law, and money, and he used history to illuminate how economic arrangements change over time. His analysis balanced the forces of self-interest with the need for norms, trust, and public goods. He argued that commercial society could cultivate virtues of prudence and industry, but he worried about the possible dulling of the mind by repetitive labor, prompting his support for public education. Although he used the phrase "invisible hand" sparingly, his broader system showed how decentralized decisions in well-structured markets could produce social coordination without centralized direction. The interplay of sympathy in moral life and self-interest in market life united his work thematically.

Legacy
Smith's books quickly became touchstones of the Scottish Enlightenment and, more broadly, of social science. Thomas Reid succeeded him in the Glasgow chair, continuing the tradition of moral philosophy that Smith helped to define. Legislators and pamphleteers drew upon The Wealth of Nations in arguing for tariff reform and against monopolistic privileges. Later economists reinterpreted his ideas in formal terms, but Smith's original arguments remained anchored in history, institutional detail, and a humane concern for character. His influence reached across disciplines and borders, shaping discussions of taxation, trade, education, and the role of the state. Even as economics specialized, readers returned to The Theory of Moral Sentiments to recover the ethical framework within which Smith placed commerce and policy. Through friendships with figures like Hume, debates with the physiocrats Quesnay and Turgot, and collaborations with men of science such as Black and Hutton, Smith stood at the center of a conversation that transformed modern understandings of society.

Our collection contains 30 quotes who is written by Adam, under the main topics: Motivational - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth - Justice.

Other people realated to Adam: Max Stirner (Philosopher), William Graham Sumner (Businessman), David Ricardo (Economist), Harriet Martineau (Writer), Randy Forbes (Politician), Henry Hazlitt (Philosopher), Thomas Reid (Philosopher), Tom G. Palmer (Educator), James Boswell (Lawyer), Jim Cooper (Politician)

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