Quotes About Labor

This is just what I have thought when I have seen slaves at work - they seem to go through the motions of labor without putting strength into them. They keep their powers in reserve for their own use at night, perhaps.

Hardly a competent workman can be found who does not devote a considerably amount of time to studying just how slowly he can work and convince his employer that he is going at a good price.

The every day activity of slaves reproduces slavery

Oh, I wouldn't say that. Work, my dear Blushweaver, is like fertilizer." "It smells?" He smiled. "No, I was thinking that work is like fertilizer in that I'm glad it exists; I just don't ever want to get stuck in it.

If you wish to become a storyteller, here is a hint: sell your labor, but not your mind.

Everything costs money," Ham said. "But, what is money? A physical representation of the abstract concept of effort.

The fact that the entire globe now operates according to the same economic princi­ples—­production or­ga­nized for profit using legally ­free wage labor and mostly privately owned capital, with decentralized coordination—is without historical pre­ce­dent.

employees—cooks, maids, amahs, tailors, drivers, accountants, managers, and advisers. A few had their

Today there is still a battle going on between those who carry sacks of cement, and those who place them on their women's heads.

With all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens,—a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.

In my opinion, the sun was made to light worthier toil than this.

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies

How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot. The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

The laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine.

My excuse for not lecturing against the use of tobacco is, that I never chewed it; that is a penalty which reformed tobacco chewers have to pay; though there are things enough I have chewed, which I could lecture against. If you should ever be betrayed into any of these philanthropies, do not let your left hand know what your right hand does , for it is not worth knowing. Rescue the drowning and tie your shoe-strings. Take your time, and set about some free labor.

In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial. It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do.

No puedo creer que nuestro sistema industrial sea el mejor modo por el que podamos vestirnos. La condición de los obreros se parece cada día más a la de los ingleses y no hay que sorprenderse, ya que, por lo que he oído y observado, el objetivo principal no es que la humanidad esté bien y honestamente vestida, sino, indudablemente, que las corporaciones se enriquezcan.

The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also.

Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine.

To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.

It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man; it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve?

But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.

Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then throwing them back again, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.