Adam Quotes - page 17
Does anybody now believe in the story of the serpent? I pity any man or woman who, in this nineteenth century, believes in that childish fable. Why did Adam and Eve disobey? Why, they were tempted. By whom? The devil. Who made the devil? God. What did God make him for? Why did he not tell Adam and Eve about this serpent? Why did he not watch the devil, instead of watching Adam and Eve? Instead of turning them out, why did he not keep him from getting in? Why did he not have his flood first, and drown the devil, before he made a man and woman. And yet, people who call themselves intelligent-professors in colleges and presidents of venerable institutions-teach children and young men that the Garden of Eden story is an absolute historical fact. I defy any man to think of a more childish thing. This God, waiting around Eden-knowing all the while what would happen-having made them on purpose so that it would happen, then does what? Holds all of us responsible, and we were not there.
Robert G. Ingersoll
They're photographs by Adam Fuss. He's an artist. They are beautiful, artistic photos - more silhouettes than anything else. It's not like, "Hey, Mom and Dad are naked, come check it out!" But if I go to the bathroom and my kid walks in, I'm not going to be like, "Oh my God! Close the door!" They see their parents naked all the time. We are not ashamed.
Heidi Klum
Children, to be truly in this stage is the deepest ground of genuine humility and annihilation. This, in truth, cannot be grasped by the senses. For here he receives the most If we had here with us a human being in his primal nobility, pure as Adam in paradise...his simple nature unadorned - that person would be so luminous and pure, so ravishing and richly favoured by God that no one would be able to comprehend his purity nor with his reason conceive of it profound insight possible into his nothingness. Here he sinks as deep as it is possible into the ground of humility; the deeper, the higher, because here high and deep are one and the same...In this state one achieves true unity of prayer spoken of in the epistle that truly brings it about that a person becomes one with God.
Johannes Tauler
Adam's temperament was the first command the Deity ever issued to a human being on this planet. And it was the only command Adam would never be able to disobey. It said, "Be weak, be water, be characterless, be cheaply persuadable." The later command, to let the fruit alone, was certain to be disobeyed. Not by Adam himself, but by his temperament - which he did not create and had no authority over.
Mark Twain
Adam Smith's central insight remains true today: There is no greater generator of wealth and innovation than a system of free enterprise that unleashes the full potential of individual men and women. That's what led to the Industrial Revolution that began in the factories of Manchester. That is what led to the dawn of the Information Age that arose from the office parks of Silicon Valley. That's why countries like China, India and Brazil are growing so rapidly -- because in fits and starts, they are moving toward market-based principles that the United States and the United Kingdom have always embraced.
Barack Obama
It was Adam Smith, the father of free-market economics, who once said, "They who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.” And for those of you who don't speak old-English let me translate. It means if you work hard, you should make a decent living. If you work hard, you should be able to support a family.
Barack Obama
Where Adam Smith and David Ricardo had envisaged a growing worldwide division of labor, they had thought that each country would freely select the commodities it was most qualified to produce, and that each would exchange its optimal commodity for the optimal commodity of others. Thus in Ricardo's example, Britain would send Portugal its textiles, while Britons would consume Portuguese wines in turn. What his vision of free commodity exchange omits are the constraints that governed the selection of particular commodities, and the political and military sanctions used to ensure the continuation of quiet asymmetrical exchanges that benefited one party while diminishing the assets of another.
Eric Wolf
[T]he simple fact is, of course, that in normal trade all parties gain; there exist mutual gains from trade. The great contribution of Adam Smith lay in his popularization of this simple point, but the full import of this conception for democratic political theory does not seem to have yet been appreciated.
Adam Smith
Adam Smith was the first to perceive that we have stumbled upon methods of ordering human economic cooperation that exceed the limits of our knowledge and perception. His 'invisible hand' had perhaps better have been described as an invisible or unsurveyable pattern. We are led - for example by the pricing system in market exchange - to do things by circumstances of which we are largely unaware and which produce results that we do not intend. In our economic activities we do not know the needs which we satisfy nor the sources of the things which we get.
Adam Smith
The Wealth of Nations is in no sense a textbook. Adam smith is writing to his age, not to his classroom; he is expounding a doctrine that is meant to be of importance in running an empire, not an abstract treatise for academic distribution. The dragons that he slays (such as the Mercantilist philosophy, which takes over two hundred pages to die) were alive and panting, if a little tired, in his day. And finally, the book is a revolutionary one. To be sure, Smith would hardly have countenanced an upheaval that disordered the gentlemanly classes and enthroned the common poor. But the import of The Wealth of Nations is revolutionary, nonetheless.
Adam Smith
Partisans of the free market invoke Adam Smith in order to lend the authority of his name to the case they themselves want to make: for the complete removal of the state from economic enterprise; for the economic sovereignty of the market; and for leaving all questions of production and distribution to the magic of the invisible hand... But...the reason Adam Smith wanted an end to government intervention in the market was that in his time (in contrast to today) it was only thanks to state intervention that what he called "the mean rapacity, the monopolising spirit of merchants and manufacturers" was able to dominate the economy, to the great detriment of the society as a whole.
Adam Smith
Economic theory as derived from Adam Smith assumes first that homo economicus acts with perfect optimality on complete information, and second that when many of the species homo economicus do that, their actions add up to the best possible outcome for everybody. Neither of these assumptions stands up long against the evidence.
Adam Smith
Everything that psychology has learned about the processes of human choice is consistent with the view expressed by Adam Smith. People do have reasons for what they do, but these reasons depend very much on how people frame or represent the situations in which they find themselves, and upon the information they have or obtain about the variables that they take into account. Their rationality is a procedural rationality; there is no claim that they grasp the encironment accurately or comprehensively. To predict their behavior in specific instances, we must ourselves know what they are attending to, and what information they have.
Adam Smith
In generating the first ever systematic account of the market mechanism in commercial society, Smith's political economy drew not only on his critical reflections of the unsytematic nature of earlier economic writing, but equally on his didactic revisions of earlier natural law and natural jurisprudence traditions as well as the empirically suggestive but unsystematic historical inductive method of tracing the progress of civil society previously introduced by thinkers such as the great Montesquieu. These revisions can be linked directly to Smith's political thinking. It may be questioned whether Adam Smith can be said to have developed a political theory. Certainly, it has been and yet remains a subject of debate. Unquestionably, however, Smith isolated important political concerns and made political conceptual contributions which he linked systematically to his theory of commercial society and the conduct of the market.
Adam Smith
