Quotes About Work

The first condition of education is being able to put someone to wholesome and meaningful work.

Some slaves are scoured to their work by whips, others by their restlessness and ambition.

Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions.

Men don't and can't live by exchanging articles, but by producing them. They don't live by trade, but by work. Give up that foolish and vain title of Trades Unions and take that of laborers Unions.

The beginning and almost the end of all good law is that everyone shall work for their bread and receive good bread for their work.

As the semantic engineer, your job is naming the parts and tightening nuts and bolts. I suggest you get back to your office and do that - right now!

Today I had set aside for spading. Now there is nothing pleasanter than spading when the ground is soft and damp. You turn a spade full and then carefully knock all the lumps to pieces and you go on for hours without thinking about anything.

Whereas in the past a worker lived in his or her work, he or she now works in order to live outside his or her work.

When workers can get and equal return for less effort, workers make less effort

In regard to education, something has been done by the Provincial Legislature but to build churches, and to place clergymen is a work of greater difficulty.

The world is work; life is work; growth is work; all things are full of labour, and attain their perfection only by labour.

It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.

lest the habit of work should be broken, and a taste for idleness acquired

Marble that was still attached to the mountain vein, or freshly quarried, was considered alive because porous stone retains moisture absorbed from the ground. Quarry sap makes the marble soft, sparkling, and easy to work. After exposure to the air, this calcium-soaked water evaporates, and the stone becomes drier and harder-cotto, Michelangelo calls it in his contract.

A force of two hundred cleaners—160 women, and forty men—reported to Brown. There were cleaners on duty twenty-four hours a day, but the bulk of the janitorial work was done after normal business hours. All the floors were cleaned at least once a day.

The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that no longer offer important work to do. Bells destroy the past and future, rendering every interval the same as any other, as the abstraction of a map renders every living mountain and river the same, even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with significance.

In 1909 a factory inspector did an informal survey of 500 working children in 20 factories. She found that 412 of them would rather work in the terrible conditions of the factories than return to school. In one experiment in Milwaukee, for example, 8,000 youth...were asked if they would return full-time to school if they were paid about the same wages as they earned at work; only 16 said they would.

child labor becomes a label of condemnation in spite of its ancient function as the quickest, most reliable way to human independence—

the lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything?

How many schoolteachers were aware of what they actually were a part of? Surely a number close to zero. In schoolteaching, as in hamburger-flipping, the paycheck is the decisive ingredient. No insult is meant, at bottom this is what realpolitik means. We all have to eat.

Any economy in which the most common tasks are the shuffling of paper, the punching of buttons, and the running of mouths isn't an order into which we should be pushing kids as if such jobs there were the avenue to a good life.

The whole weight of our economy and its job prospects is built on the outlook that people are empty.

When you flip hamburgers, sit at a computer all day, unpack and shelve merchandise from China year after year, you manage the tedium better if you have a shallow inner life, one you can escape through booze, drugs, sex, media, or other low level addictive behaviors. Easier to keep sane if your inner life is shallow. School, thought Harris the great American schoolman, should prepare ordinary men and women for lifetimes of alienation. Can you say he wasn't fully rational?

Global economics does not speak to the public need for meaningful work, affordable housing, fulfilling education, adequate medical care, a clean environment, honest and accountable government, social and cultural renewal, or simple justice. All global ambitions are based on a definition of productivity and the good life