Quotes About Labor

Slaves, like oxen and sheep, were known as 'live money'.

A large proportion of Venetians worked in the textile industry. There were the lace-makers, their eyesight ruined by their labour. Children, from the age of five, were enrolled in the trade. The exquisite refinement of the art, prized by the rich matrons of Europe, can be measured in human suffering.

Capital requires the separation of the worker from the means of production and subsistence

Bright specks that were commute ships, little eggs that carried businessmen and white-collar workers around. The huge transport tubes that shot masses of workmen to factories and labor camps from their housing units.

Morning, noon & bloody night, Seven sodding days a week, I slave at filthy WORK, that might Be done by any book-drunk freak. This goes on until I kick the bucket. FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT

What is worth having is worth working for.

You have to work. Did you think you could snap your fingers, and have it as a gift? What is worth having is worth working for.

El trabajo sin alegría es ruin; el trabajo sin dolor es ruin; el dolor sin trabajo es ruin; la alegría sin trabajo es ruin. John Ruskin

It is therefore only at the money moment—the moment of capitalist universality—that we can tell where we are in relation to value and surplus-value.

Capital is process, and that is that.

Shed sweat—not blood

Without the work, there is nothing.

As Jim Lawrence, a black labor activist at a GM plant in Dayton, Ohio, describes it, during the 1960s 'the union gave foremen a blank check to mistreat blacks and keep them out of the high-rate machine jobs and the skilled trades.' 

Lower East Side socialism favored the worker over the boss and the group over the individual.

The labor into which a heart has poured its whole love—where will it have its say, to excite and inspire, and when?

An old notice was pasted to a wall beside the road: "Pay for field hands. Ninety sen a day, meals included. Women forty per cent less.

When a stretch of Eye Street was finally ready, he had the barricades gracefully opened by two trained bears on loan from the circus. As a result, both Metro and the circus got good press. Even then Pfanstiehl could not please everybody; a labor representative berated him for giving work to nonunion bears.

when you're writing it's such an obsessive thing, and then when you're done it's like pushing something out of your body (...)

A feminist who had always been supported by men—first my father and now the Noted Activist—and who, though she continually harangued me about the "nobility of labor," had never, as far as I knew, actually been gainfully employed.

Dis love! Dat's just whut's got us uh pullin' and haulin' and sweatin' and doin' from can't see in de mornin' till can't see at night. Nanny to Janie

Dat's de reason de sister in black works harder than anybody else in the world. De white man tells de n****r to work and he takes and tells his wife.

What yo' all reckon is the matter sho' 'nough? Must be something terrible when white folks get slow about putting us to work.

Writing is agony. I hate it.

My dad worked all day. He would get up at five in the morning and didn't stop working until 10 at night, every day the same.