Quotes About Labor

Farming is backbreaking work, but at least it is honest labor. This killing isn't honest. It is thievery… the thievery of men's lives, and no right-minded person should aspire to it.

Dad was in the United Auto Workers at work so seniority was real important in our house.

Some sense of the death toll can be gleaned from the fact that SS spokesmen at the Wannsee conference contended that construction labor on the Eastern Front should become one of the main vehicles for wiping out every living Jew in Europe.

West once said, "An analyzer costs ten thousand dollars. Overtime for engineers is free.

Contractors get wealthy in part by subcontracting out large pieces of a job, hiring unskilled labor for one aspect of it and semiskilled labor for another

1. Quality land and natural resources 2. Intellectual property, or good ideas about what should be produced 3. Quality labor with unique skills

All that can be cherished from this world, all that makes life worth living is that which is mined from its bowels through your own toil, fashioned from its clay by your own craft, fired in the kiln of your heart. Oh, how precious, how delightful a feast, the life that has been forged by its own master!

There was no time during the rebellion when I did not think, and often say, that the South was more to be benefited by its defeat than the North. The latter had the people, the institutions, and the territory to make a great and prosperous nation. The former was burdened with an institution abhorrent to all civilized people not brought up under it, and one which degraded labor, kept it in ignorance, and enervated the governing class.

If culture did not filter, it would be inane — as inane as the formless, boundless Internet is on its own. And if we all possessed the boundless knowledge of the Web, we would be idiots! Culture is an instrument for making a hierarchical system of intellectual labor.

Mors est quiest viatoris – finis est omnis laboris.

This was in truth not living; it was scarcely even existing, and they felt that it was too little for the price they paid. They were willing to work all the time; and when people did their best, ought they not to be able to keep alive?

The great packing machine ground on remorselessly, without thinking of green fields; and the men and women and children who were part of it never saw any green thing, not even a flower. Four or five miles to the east of them lay the blue waters of Lake Michigan; but for all the good it did them it might have been as far away as the Pacific Ocean. They had only Sundays, and then they were too tired to walk. They were tied to the great packing machine, and tied to it for life.

It was piecework, and she was apt to have a family to keep alive; and stern and ruthless economic laws had arranged it that she could only do this by working just as she did, with all her soul upon her work, and with never an instant for a glance at the well-dressed ladies and gentlemen who came to stare at her, as at some wild beast in a menagerie.

What they wanted from a hog was all the profits that could be got out of him; and that was what they wanted from the workingman, and also that was what they wanted from the public. What the hog thought of it, and what he suffered, were not considered; and no more was it with labor, and no more with the purchaser of meat.

The eloquent senator was explaining the system of protection; an ingenious device whereby the workingman permitted the manufacturer to charge him higher prices, in order that he might receive higher wages; thus taking his money out of his pocket with one hand, and putting a part of it back with the other. To the senator this unique arrangement had somehow become identified with the higher verities of the universe. It

Jurgis had come there, and thought he was going to make himself useful, and rise and become a skilled man; but he would soon find out his error—for nobody rose in Packingtown by doing good work. You could lay that down for a rule—if you met a man who was rising in Packingtown, you met a knave.

We have a flabby public opinion which would wring its hands in anguish if we took the labor leader by the scruff of his neck, backed him up against a wall, and filled him with lead. Countries which consider themselves every bit as civilized as we do not hesitate about such matters for a moment. Whenever

I have had opportunity to observe the effects of inherited wealth, and for the average young person it is a sentence to futility and boredom. It cuts the mainspring of activity; the person no longer has to do anything, and so he doesn't, and if he tries, he fails nine times out of ten. You at this moment are providing the strongest incentive to labor that I have ever had in my life.

The Army didn't know who its true friends were; it considered Socialists to be crackpots, just as they were called in America, and the people who knew how to get things done were the powerful ones at the top—the same who had hired the Nazi-Fascist gangsters to put down labor and keep political control in the hands of the well-born and well-to-do. F.D.R. himself understood this quite clearly; but how many in his administration understood it, and how many in Congress

in the next dark place a camel harnessed to a pole went round and round, working a press which squeezed olive oil from loads of the fruit; the camel had a hood over his face, so that he wouldn't see what he was doing, and might dream that he was out on the desert trails where he had been born.

Old Antanas had been a worker ever since he was a child; he had run away from home when he was twelve, because his father beat him for trying to learn to read.

Also, in each of the three nations was the same deadly and incessant struggle between rich and poor; between those who owned the land and working capital and those who did the hard labor for starvation wages.

British capitalists don't want a Left government in Spain; they'd be afraid of severance taxes. They want what they call a strong government, one that holds labor down and puts the taxes on the consumer.

the "two hundred families" which ruled France had made up their minds that their interests required the overthrow of the Third Republic, and the establishment of some sort of dictatorship which would break the power of the labor unions, as had been so efficiently done in Italy, Germany, Austria, and Spain.