Genuine, and traceable to the page: Smith wrote it in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter I, Part III, Article III — and it is already there in the 1776 first edition, not a later addition. The popular version is accurate as far as it goes, but it stops halfway through Smith’s sentence.
“Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition” Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776), Book V, Chapter I, Part III, Article III. Verified at quotle.info
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Provenance
The source
Work
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Published
9 March 1776 · Printed for W. Strahan and T. Cadell, London
Location
Book V, Chapter I, Part III, Article III — “Of the Expence of the Institutions for the Instruction of People of all Ages”
Status
Verbatim — but the popular version cuts the sentence in half
The first of those remedies is the study of science and philosophy, which the state might render almost universal among all people of middling or more than middling rank and fortune; not by giving salaries to teachers in order to make them negligent and idle, but by instituting some sort of probation, even in the higher and more difficult sciences, to be undergone by every person before he was permitted to exercise any liberal profession, or before he could be received as a candidate for any honourable office, of trust or profit. If the state imposed upon this order of men the necessity of learning, it would have no occasion to give itself any trouble about providing them with proper teachers. They would soon find better teachers for themselves, than any whom the state could provide for them. Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition; and where all the superior ranks of people were secured from it, the inferior ranks could not be much exposed to it.Book V, Ch. I, Pt. III, Art. III
The famous quotation is the first half of the bolded sentence. Smith is describing the first of “two very easy and effectual remedies” by which the state might soften the harsher edges of the religious sects into which he imagined a free country dividing. The second remedy, in the very next paragraph, is “the frequency and gaiety of public diversions” — painting, poetry, music, dancing and theatre.
The sentence appears verbatim in the Project Gutenberg full text of The Wealth of Nations ↗, in Book V — reading in full: “Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition; and where all the superior ranks of people were secured from it, the inferior ranks could not be much exposed to it.”
It is not a later insertion. A scan of the 1776 first edition, vol. 2 ↗ (“London: Printed for W. Strahan; and T. Cadell, in the Strand, MDCCLXXVI”) carries the sentence in period long-s type: “Science is the great antidote to the poifon of enthufiafm and fuperftition.”
Quote Investigator ↗ has never had to investigate this one. The line surfaces there only in passing, reproduced from a modern quotation compilation while QI untangles a different and genuinely muddled saying about science.
✓Public domain
The Wealth of Nations was first published in London on 9 March 1776 by W. Strahan and T. Cadell, and this sentence is present in that first edition. Written in English and published more than two centuries before 1931, the work is firmly in the public domain in the United States — no translation is involved, so no separate translation copyright arises.
Fact-check
What goes wrong with this one
Nobody is stealing this quotation from anyone — the attribution to Adam Smith is solid, and rare among famous-name quotes for being checkable right down to the first-edition page. What goes wrong is the wording and the meaning.
✕
The wordingThe missing second half truncated
Smith did not stop at “superstition.” The sentence runs on: “…and where all the superior ranks of people were secured from it, the inferior ranks could not be much exposed to it.” Quotation sites almost universally present the first clause alone as a complete sentence — Goodreads ↗ gives it truncated, with no ellipsis to signal the cut. The full sentence is in the Gutenberg text ↗.
✕
The meaning“Enthusiasm” did not mean eagerness meaning drift
Read today, the line sounds like a warning against getting carried away. In 1776 “enthusiasm” was a term of art for religious fanaticism. Smith’s friend David Hume devoted an entire essay to it, “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm” ↗, describing the enthusiast’s “frenzy” in which “human reason, and even morality are rejected as fallacious guides: And the fanatic madman delivers himself over, blindly…”
✕
The contextIt is a passage about churches, not laboratories out of context
The quotation circulates as a general-purpose banner for science. In place it is a policy proposal about religious sects: Smith’s remedy is an examination requirement for the professional and office-holding classes, and it is paired in the next paragraph with a second remedy of public entertainments. Both sit inside the article on institutions for religious instruction ↗.
✓Adam Smith really wrote it, in The Wealth of Nations in 1776 — you can read it in the first edition itself ↗. He just wrote more of it than anyone quotes, and meant something narrower than anyone means.
Context
Why it mattered
Smith is not writing a manifesto for science over religion. He is solving a political problem. Book V of The Wealth of Nations asks what the state owes its citizens, and by this point Smith has argued that a country with a single established church, or two or three big ones, is a country primed for faction and persecution — whereas a country splintered into “two or three hundred, or perhaps into as many thousand small sects” would find that no sect was large enough to menace anyone. The catch is that tiny sects tend toward morals that are “disagreeably rigorous and unsocial.”
So Smith proposes two remedies for the rigour, not for the religion. The first is compulsory study: require a “probation” in science and philosophy of anyone entering a liberal profession or seeking public office, and the educated ranks will inoculate themselves. The second, sitting right beside it, is fun — “the frequency and gaiety of public diversions,” painting and poetry and music and dancing and theatre, to dispel “that melancholy and gloomy humour which is almost always the nurse of popular superstition and enthusiasm.” The line about science is one half of a two-part prescription whose other half is: put on more plays.
Smith’s other remedy for fanaticism, in the very next paragraph, was more dancing.
Read the full story
Smith’s reasoning in the rest of the sentence is frankly hierarchical, which is likely why it gets trimmed. “Where all the superior ranks of people were secured from it, the inferior ranks could not be much exposed to it” assumes that enlightenment trickles downward from the educated classes — an assumption that sits awkwardly with the way the quotation is now deployed as a democratic slogan.
Just pages earlier in the same article, Smith quotes at length “by far the most illustrious philosopher and historian of the present age” on the dangers of a self-interested clergy. He means his friend David Hume, whose own essay “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm” supplies the vocabulary Smith is using here.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1723–1790 · Scottish moral philosopher & political economist
Adam Smith was a Scottish moral philosopher who taught logic and moral philosophy at Glasgow before publishing The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1776), the book that made him the founding figure of modern economics. He is remembered for the invisible hand and the division of labour, but The Wealth of Nations is a sprawling work of moral and political philosophy whose fifth and final book turns to the duties of the state — defence, justice, public works, and, in the passage that produced this line, religious instruction. Smith wrote as an Enlightenment critic of factional religious zeal, in close intellectual company with his friend David Hume, whom he quotes at length just pages before this sentence.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source — Chicago
Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. London: Printed for W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776. Book V, chap. 1, pt. 3, art. 3 (“Of the Expence of the Institutions for the Instruction of People of all Ages”), vol. 2.
MLA (9th ed.)
Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776.
APA (7th ed.)
Smith, A. (1776). An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. W. Strahan and T. Cadell.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition’?” Last verified 15 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/science-is-the-great-antidote-to-the-poison-of-enthusiasm