Quotes from Paul Lafargue

The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods.

Our epoch has been called the century of work. It is in fact the century of pain, misery and corruption.

Work, work, proletarians, to increase social wealth and your individual poverty; work, work, in order that becoming poorer, you may have more reason to work and become miserable. Such is the inexorable law of capitalist production.

O Laziness, mother of the arts and noble virtues, be thou the balm of human anguish.

Confronted with this double madness of the labourers killing themselves with over-production and vegetating in abstinence, the great problem of capitalist production is no longer to find producers and to multiply their powers but to discover consumers, to excite their appetites and create in them fictitious needs.

Our epoch has been called the century of work. It is in fact the century of pain, misery and corruption.

In proportion as the mass of citizens who possess political rights increases, and the number of elected ruler's increases, the actual power is concentrated and becomes the monopoly of a smaller and smaller group of individuals.

In proportion as the machine is improved and performs man's work with an ever increasing rapidity and exactness, the labourer, instead of prolonging his former rest times, redoubles his ardour, as if he wished to rival the machine. O, absurd and murderous competition!

Healthy in body and mind, I end my life before pitiless old age which has taken from me my pleasures and joys one after another; and which has been stripping me of my physical and mental powers, can paralyse my energy and break my will, making me a burden to myself and to others

The bourgeoisie, when it was struggling against the nobility sustained by the clergy, hoisted the flag of free thought and atheism; but once triumphant, it changed its tone and manner and today it uses religion to support its economic and political supremacy

Ä°çinde bulunduÄŸumuz ça??n çal??ma asr? olduÄŸu söyleniyor.Fakat asl?nda bu ac?,sefalet ve yozlaÅŸma asr?d?r!

Yoksul uluslarda halk?n rahat? yerindedir. Zengin uluslardaysa, halk, genellikle yoksuldur.

Cannot the labourers understand that by over-working themselves they exhaust their own strength and that of their progeny, that they are used up and long before their time come to be incapable of any work at all, that absorbed and brutalized by this single vice they are no longer men but pieces of men, that they kill within themselves all beautiful faculties, to leave nothing alive and flourishing except the furious madness for work.

Work takes all the time and with it one has no leisure for the republic and his friends.

Philosophers hold liberty and justice to be universal and necessary concepts because they know of no societies other than those founded on private property.

All individual and social woes are born of passion for work.

Dans notre société, quelles sont les classes qui aiment le travail pour le travail ? Les paysans propriétaires, les petits bourgeois, qui les uns courbés sur leurs terres, les autres acoquinés dans leurs boutiques, se remuent comme la taupe dans sa galerie souterraine, et jamais ne se redressent pour regarder à loisir la nature.

Les philanthropes acclament bienfaiteurs de l'humanité ceux qui, pour s'enrichir en fainéantant, donnent du travail aux pauvres.

Trabajad, trabajad, proletarios, para aumentar la fortuna social y vuestras miserias individuales; trabajad, trabajad para que, haciéndoos cada vez más pobres, tengáis más razón de trabajar y de ser miserables." (1848, 11) Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy

Sevme, içme ve tembellik haricinde Tembellik edelim her ÅŸeyde. (Lessing)

In America the machine is invading all branches of farm production, from the making of butter to the weeding of wheat. Why, because the American, free and lazy, would prefer a thousand deaths to the bovine life of the French peasant. Plowing, so painful and so crippling to the laborer in our glorious France, is in the American West an agreeable open-air pastime, which he practices in a sitting posture, smoking his pipe nonchalantly.