It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard for their own interest.
—Adam Smith, 1776
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Quotes
There’s folks ’ud hold a sieve under the pump and expect to carry away the water.
—George Eliot, 1859When a traveler returneth home, let him not leave the countries where he hath traveled altogether behind him.
—Francis Bacon, 1625There never is absolute birth nor complete death, in the strict sense, consisting in the separation of the soul from the body. What we call births are developments and growths, while what we call deaths are envelopments and diminutions.
—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1714What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.
—Frederick Douglass, 1855Every man takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.
—Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851