Adam Smith

Those unproductive hands … may consume so great a share … that all the frugality and good conduct of individuals may not be able to compensate … this violent and forced encroachment.

What can be added to the happiness of a man who is in health, out of debt, and has a clear conscience?

Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality… for one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

After all the proper subjects of taxation have been exhausted, if the exigencies of the state still continue to require new taxes, they must be imposed upon improper ones.

There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.

A physicist is an atom’s way of knowing about atoms.

Science becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal.

If you look at the history of our country over the last 100 years, there have been periods where science and research have been celebrated. They were really kind of held up as heroes in society, which encouraged a generation of people to go into these fields.

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

If I could snap my fingers and do one thing in science, I would get more funding for basic science. But the level of funding that needs to be done is not on the order of millions, like the cost of the Breakthrough Prizes. It’s billions to tens of billions.

Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.

To expect that the intricacies of science will be pierced by a careless glance, or the eminences of fame ascended without labour, is to expect a peculiar privilege, a power denied to the rest of mankind; but to suppose that the maze is inscrutable to diligence, or the heights inaccessible to perseverance, is to submit tamely to the tyranny of fancy, and enchain the mind in voluntary shackles.

The latest refinements of science are linked with the cruelties of the Stone Age.

Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.

It’s really cold outside, they are calling it a major freeze, weeks ahead of normal. Man, we could use a big fat dose of global warming!

If you have a glass full of liquid you can discourse forever on its qualities, discuss whether it is cold, warm, whether it is really and truly composed of H-2-O, or even mineral water, or sake. Meditation is Drinking it!

Every succeeding scientific discovery makes greater nonsense of old-time conceptions of sovereignty.

Science, after all, is only an expression for our ignorance of our own ignorance.

Science is always wrong, it never solves a problem without creating ten more.