It is not for its own sake that men desire money, but for the sake of what they can purchase with it. - Adam Smith

It seldom happens, however, that a great proprietor is a great improver.

The tolls for the maintenance of a high road, cannot with any safety be made the property of private persons.

Of all those expensive and uncertain projects, however, which bring bankruptcy upon the greater part of the people who engage in in them, there is none perhaps more perfectly ruinous than the search after new silver and gold mines. It is perhaps the most disadvantageous lottery in the world, or the one in which the gain of those who draw the prizes bears the least proportion to the loss of those who draw the blanks: for though the prizes are few and the blanks are many, the common price of a ticket is the whole fortune of a very rich man.