Quotes About Labor

Some worked to put food on our tables while others built the tables.

Their creation story bothered Uriel the most. In their narrative, the Anunnaki created mankind to be slaves of the gods, and bear the yoke of their labors, to mine their precious elements and build their holy kingdoms. Clay was mixed with the flesh of a god and then spat upon and mankind was birthed. So Elohim's purpose of male and female created in his image to rule over creation was displaced with an opposite narrative, one that carried an irony not lost on Uriel:

In the 1860s the leaders of the cotton belt made one of the most prodigious miscalculations in recorded history. On the eve of the era of applied technologies, in which more and more work is done with fewer people and less effort, they made war to preserve the day of chattel slavery - the era of gang labor, with its reliance on the same use of human muscles that built the pyramids. The lost cause was lost before it started to fight. Inability to see what is going on in the world can be costly.

Now I work down at the carwash Where all it ever does is rain

Meaningless distraction drains you of the energy you should be placing into more serious things or using to simply enjoy the rewards of your labor.

The Internet of Things has a slight utopian tinge, but mostly it has a certain melancholy, even grim air. It's not some psychedelic exploration of the cyberspace of the digital. It's material labour, it's hardware, it's a hard slog.

A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be more; otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation. —Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations1

Strange though it sounds, if we're "running out" of anything, it's people.

You get up about 2-3 o'clock in the morning and get through about 7 or 8 and 12 hours later you start all over. That's the worst kind of work a person can do. You have to do these two shifts to get one day.

bowing over still further his chronically broken back, he toiled away, as if toil were life itself, and the heavy beating of his hammer the heavy beating of his heart.

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules.

Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of.

I abominate all honorable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever.

The toiling masses,' and all that. This country has no toiling masses, we have Dan at the diner and Verne in the mine and Jerry in the steel mill and Burdette at the filling station and so on. They don't toil, for Christ's sake, they do a day's work and then they go home and have a beer. You can't get them into a mass for anything. If there's a good ball game on TV they won't come out to see the president ride by.

he strode among the champions in fear for the shepherd of the people, lest he be hurt, and all their labor slip away into nothing.

Mas nunca gostei de lavouras nem de cuidar da casa onde são criados ótimos filhos; de lanças polidas e de setas coisas terríveis, diante das quais outros homens ficam arrepiados, Mas um deus fê-las agradáveis ao meu espírito: homens diferentes se comprazem com diferentes trabalhos.

IWW organizer Joseph Ettor said: If the workers of the world want to win, all they have to do is recognize their own solidarity. They have nothing to do but fold their arms and the world will stop. The workers are more powerful with their hands in their pockets than all the property of the capitalists. . . .

It launched one worker, Eugene Debs, into a lifetime of activism for labor unions and socialism. Debs was arrested for supporting the strike. Two years later he wrote: The issue is Socialism versus Capitalism. I am for Socialism because I am for humanity. We have been cursed with the reign of gold long enough. Money constitutes no proper basis for civilization. The time has come to regenerate [renew] society—we are on the eve of a universal change. Like

All you have to do, gentlemen, for you have the numbers, is to unite on one idea - that the workingmen shall rule the country. What man makes, belongs to him, and the workingman made this country.

If the workers of the world want to win, all they have to do is recognize their own solidarity. They have nothing to do but fold their arms and the world will stop. The workers are more powerful with their hands in the pockets than all the property of capitalists. . .

True, fascism was not to be tolerated by decent people. But neither was racism or colonialism or slave labor camps—one or another of which was a characteristic of all of the Allied powers.

More than half the colonists who came to the North American shores in the colonial period came as servants.

Thus it could moderate labor rebellion by channeling energy into elections—just as the constitutional system channeled possibly troublesome energy into voting.

God wept; but that mattered little to an unbelieving age; what mattered most was that the world wept and still is weeping and blind with tears and blood. For there began to rise in America in 1876 a new capitalism and a new enslavement of labor.