A Quote by Adam Smith

Men, like animals, naturally multiply in proportion to the means of their subsistence.

Adam Smith

Quote Topics

Animals Like Means Men Multiply Naturally Proportion Subsistence

Quote Author

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

The proportion between the velocity with which men or animals move, and the weights they carry, is a matter of considerable importance, particularly in military affairs.

Charles Babbage

Prudery is often immodestly modest; its habit is to multiply sentinels in proportion as the fortress is less threatened.

George D. Prentice

I don’t like animals. It’s a strange thing, I don’t like men and I don’t like animals. As for God, he is beginning to disgust me.

Samuel Beckett

But she took her husband's jokes and joviality as patiently as everything else, considering that "men would be so", and viewing the stronger sex in the light of animals whom it had pleased Heaven to make naturally troublesome, like bulls and turkey-cocks.

George Eliot

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.

Ambrose Bierce

I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans - but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?

Jesmyn Ward

What is really desired, under the name of riches, is essentially, power over men ... this power ... is in direct proportion to the poverty of the men over whom it is exercised, and in inverse proportion to the number of persons who are as rich as ourselves.

John Ruskin

The men who attempt to survive, not by means of reason, but by means of force, are attempting to survive by the method of animals.

Ayn Rand

Critics are a kind of freebooters in the republic of letters--who, like deer, goats and divers other graminivorous animals, gain subsistence by gorging upon buds and leaves of the young shrubs of the forest, thereby robbing them of their verdure, and retarding their progress to maturity.

Washington Irving

. . . money . . . is really the difference between men and animals, most of the things men feel, animals feel, and vice versa, but animals do not know about money.

Gertrude Stein

If men were stubborn just in proportion as they were right, stubbornness would take her seat among the virtues; but men are generally stubborn just in proportion as they are ignorant and wrong.

Josh Billings

Error has made animals into men; is truth in a position to make men into animals again?

Friedrich Nietzsche

There are no limits to your possibilities! Your successes will multiply and increase in proportion to your mastery of the law.

Roger McDonald

The leg system of the beach animals works because of a combination of certain lengths of tubes. Because of the proportion of lengths, the animals walk smoothly. You could say that this range of numbers is their genetic code.