A Quote by Adam Smith

The annual produce of the land and labour of any nation can be increased in its value by no other means, but by increasing either the number of its productive labourers, or the productive powers of those labourers who had before been employed.

Adam Smith

Quote Topics

Annual Any Been Before Either Employed Had Increased Increasing Labour Labourers Land Means Nation Number Other Powers Produce Productive Those Value

Quote Author

Adam Smith
Scottish - Economist
June 5, 1723 - July 17, 1790

LABOUR, like all other things which are purchased and sold, and which may be increased or diminished in quantity, has its natural and its market price. The natural price of labour is that price which is necessary to enable the labourers, on with another, to subsist and to perpetuate their race, without either increase or diminution.

David Ricardo

The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniencies of life which it annually consumes, and which consist always either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations.

Adam Smith

The purpose and effect of [land titles] have been to maintain, in the hands of robber, or slave holding class, a monopoly of all lands, and, as far as possible, of all other means of creating wealth; and thus to keep the great body of labourers in such a state of poverty and dependence, as would compel them to sell their labour to their tyrants for the lowest prices at which life could be sustained

Lysander Spooner

The produce of the earth - all that is derived from its surface by the united application of labour, machinery, and capital, is divided among three classes of the community, namely, the proprietor of the land, the owner of the stock or capital necessary for its cultivation, and the labourers by whose industry it is cultivated.

David Ricardo

That the powers of labour, and of the other instruments which produce wealth, may be indefinitely increased by using their products as the means of further production.

Nassau William Senior

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed - a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

Karl Marx

The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is anywhere directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour.

Adam Smith

If one is not productive in other spheres, one is not productive in the love either.

Erich Fromm

The values of commodities are directly as the times of labor employed in their production, and are inversely as the productive powers of the labor employed.

Karl Marx

Sex work is a completely unregulated industry and to make the affront even worse, the product and the labourers are the same thing! The product is the sexuality of the actual labourers: flesh. I think in that sense, the exploitative nature of unencumbered capitalism is made even more dramatic.

David Simon

Seattle's not a particularly Jewish city, and I'm not in any way religious. Since I've been here, I've been a fairly productive, even obsessively productive, writer.

David Shields

capital cannot be more beneficially employed, then in strengthening and aiding the productive powers of nature.

Jean-Baptiste Say

Gold and silver, like other commodities, have an intrinsic value, which is not arbitrary, but is dependent on their scarcity, the quantity of labour bestowed in procuring them, and the value of the capital employed in the mines which produce them.

David Ricardo

Caste is not just a division of labour, it is a division of labourers.

B. R. Ambedkar

But it is clear that the price of labour has no necessary connection with the price of food, since it depends entirely on the supply of labourers compared with the demand.

David Ricardo

For the folk-community does not exist on the fictitious value of money but on the results of productive labour, which is what gives money its value.