Quotes About Labor

Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.

The intellectual desolation, artificially produced by converting immature human beings into mere machines.

Nothing can have value without being an object of utility. If it be useless, the labor contained in it is useless, cannot be reckoned as labor, and cannot therefore create value.

Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed.

The product of mental labor - science - always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.

Capital is dead labor, which, ampire-like, Iives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.

We should not say that one man's hour is worth another man's hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time's carcass.

the organization of labor is only another word for the forms of life of the common people, this means that the development of the market system would be accompanied by a change in the organization of society itself. All along the line, human society had become an accessory of the economic system.

There is no law of progress, and everything will depend on ourselves. But the actual situation is briefly and fairly summed up by Parkes36 in one sentence: 'Low wages, long hours, and child labour have been characteristic of capitalism not, as Marx predicted, in its old age, but in its infancy.

That left Jeb to work for whatever the bosses offered under the National Right to Work Act--the minimum wage having been abolished--enough to keep them fed and the car gassed but not enough for a roof or to save much more than coins.

It's the same thing as any colonial structure anywhere: The business of making money depends on having a peon culture.

By largely ignoring the core economy, mainstream economics has also overlooked just how much the paid economy depends upon it. Without all that cooking, washing, nursing and sweeping, there would be no workers—today or in the future—who were healthy, well-fed and ready for work each morning.

Slavery was an issue, but the primary force for war was a clash between the economic interests of the North and the South. Even the issue of slavery itself was based on economics. It may have been a moral issue in the North where prosperity was derived from the machines of heavy industry, but in the agrarian South, where fields had to be tended by vast work forces of human labor, the issue was primarily a matter of economics.

People who will not turn a shovel full of dirt on the project nor contribute a pound of materials will collect more money...than will the people who will supply all the materials and do all the work.56

The classes that wash most are those that work least.

The only time some people work like a horse is when the boss rides them.

What's better than work?" He paused. "What's worse than work?

Ant shrugged. "What's better than work?" He paused. "What's worse than work?

You hire our boys because they don't know how to ask for what they're worth. You treat them as if they were slaves.

But walls, whether brick or isolation, don't come down without a corresponding amount of labor.

Attacking the supposedly 'moral' critique of the love of money and worldly goods, he argued that 'at a time when the whole world was living in "pain economy" … and when the productivity of human labour was extremely low … it is but natural that moralists should have preached the gospel of poverty and renunciation of worldly pleasures only because they were not to be had

What's your least favorite thing to do? Why?

Charity is a very labour-intensive virtue.

You know what they say about being a slave: it's a terrible job, but at least you have job security.