Quotes About Work

Your father's not allowed to have fun. He has to sit in boring meetings all day." "Poor Daddy

For most Americans, the basic bargain that made this country great has eroded … rooted in the nagging sense that no matter how hard they work, the deck is stacked against them. This kind of gaping inequality is the defining challenge of our time … and gives lie to the promise at the very heart of America: that this is the place where you can make it if you try

But they do expect that if they're willing to work, they should be able to find a job that supports a family.

there's a direct link between doing your work and having your wishes come true.

arrebataba a la gente su iniciativa y erosionaba su amor propio. Cualquier estrategia para reducir la pobreza intergeneracional debe centrarse en el trabajo, no en la asistencia social, no sólo porque el trabajo da independencia e ingresos sino también porque el trabajo aporta orden, estructura, dignidad y oportunidades de crecimiento a la vida de las personas.

work provides independence and income but also because work provides order, structure, dignity, and opportunities for growth in people's lives.

The fuss of being president, the pomp, the press, the physical constraints - all that I could have done without. The actual work, though? The work, I loved. Even when it didn't love me back.

According to a recent poll [...] 94% of Americans agree that people who work fulltime should be able to earn enough to keep their families out of poverty.

My father had been a copper miner, uncles and grandfathers worked in the mines for the Union Pacific. So to me, sitting at a desk all day was not only a privilege but a duty: something I owed to all those people in my life, living and dead, who'd had so much more to say than anyone ever got to hear.

The organization of lab work was, and still is, entirely feudal. A "lab" was not only a place or a room or series of rooms, it was the fiefdom of a particular scientist. To "go into" a lab as a grad student was to apprentice yourself to this scientist, with the idea that you would, after several years of patient toil, ascend to a similar rank yourself, at which point you would be able to offload the manual labor to people more junior than yourself.

94 percent of Americans agree that "people who work full-time should be able to earn enough to keep their families out of poverty.

No one ever said that you could work hard—harder even than you ever thought possible—and still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty and debt.

nearly one-fifth of all homeless people (in twenty-nine cities across the nation) are employed in full-or part-time jobs.

If you hump away at menial jobs 360-plus days a year, does some kind of repetitive injury of the spirit set in? I don't know and I don't intend to find out, but I can guess that one of the symptoms is a bad case of tunnel vision. Work fills the landscape; coworkers swell to the size of family members or serious foes. Slights loom large, and a reprimand can reverberate into the night.

Dave, I didn't make it to work Monday because I was helping a wizard rescue a baby Prince out someplace between Barstow and San Bernardino?

Everyone should get dirt on his hands each day. Doctors, intellectuals. Politicians, most of all. How can we presume to uplift the life of the working man, if we don't respect his work?

Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work--that goes on, and it adds up. It goes into the ground, into crops, into children's bellies and their bright eyes. Good things don't get lost.

I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer's block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don't. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.

Even the vendors sitting on stools around the periphery work steadily at connection, nodding at potential buyers, like a sewing machine prodding its needle into the cloth.

If wishes were horses, like they say. We'd all have different shit to shovel.

OxyContin, God's gift for the laid-off deep-hole man with his back and neck bones grinding like bags of gravel. For the bent-over lady pulling double shifts at Dollar General with her shot knees and ADHD grandkids to raise by herself.

She never says gracias because life is made of survival not grace, she says, and servants are paid to bring what they're asked.

The daily work—that goes on, it adds up. It goes into the ground, into crops, into children's bellies and their bright eyes. Good things don't get lost.

We [women] have earned the right to forget about stupefying household busywork. But kitchens where food is cooked and eaten - those were really a good idea. We threw that baby out with the bathwater.