For we know so well what makes us happy that none can hope to help us so much as we help ourselves.
Enlightened selfishness is thus the root of prosperity; but we must not fall into the easy fallacy which makes Smith deaf to the plaint of the poor.

He urged the employer to have regard to the health and welfare of the worker, a regard which was the voice of reason and humanity.

Where there was conflict between love of the _status quo_ and a social good which Revolution alone could achieve, he did not, at least in the _Moral Sentiments_, hesitate to choose the latter.

Order was, for the most part, indispensable; but "the greatest and noblest of all characters" he made the reformer of the State.

Yet he is too impressed by the working of natural economic laws to belittle their influence.