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Quotes About Labor

I never enjoyed working in a film.
~ Unknown
What you looking at is the only way I don't feel like being me is labor, like I holding myself together all the time.
~ Marlon James
humans and augmented humans can't sign away their rights to their labor or bodily autonomy in perpetuity; that's like, straight-up illegal.)
~ Martha Wells
Indah's gaze wasn't exactly skeptical. "What controlled circumstances?" I said, "Isolated work installations." Her expression turned even more grim. "Corporate slave labor camps." I said, "Yes, but if we call them that, Marketing and Branding gets angry and we get a power surge through our brains that fries little pieces of our neural tissue.
~ Martha Wells
We must read the Fathers cautiously, and lay them in the gold balance, for they often stumbled and went astray, and mingled in their books many monkish things. Augustine had more work and labor, to wind himself out of the Father's writings, then he had with the heretics.
~ Martin Luther
It is not fitting that one man should live in idleness on another's labor, or be rich and live comfortably at the cost of another's hardship
~ Martin Luther
All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
Well, I offer a retuning of intention, a slightly more sober directive—to be of a place, to labour under a related indebtedness to a stretch of earth that you have not claimed but which has claimed you.
~ Martin Shaw
By 1908, future justice Louis Brandeis was able present the United States Supreme Court, in Muller v. Oregon, with more than 100 studies on the need to protect women against overwork. The strategy worked, and state regulation of women's work was declared to be constitutional. Yet notably, just three years earlier another court had rejected similar regulation of an industry in which men bore among the heaviest burdens, namely baking.[337
~ Martin Van Creveld
In 1945, out of 52 million American adult women only 19.5 million held jobs. Among married women, only a quarter did.[364] Though the image of Rosie the Riveter dominated propaganda, its link to reality was tenuous. In metal-working plants of all types, male workers outnumbered female ones more than three to one.[365]
~ Martin Van Creveld
The combination of modern anti-discrimination laws, on the one hand, and women's reluctance to pull up their sleeves, on the other, can lead to strange results. Thus, whereas 80 percent of all clerks in the United States are women, the one "clerical" job that involves substantial outdoor walking — mail delivery — is done almost entirely by men.[401
~ Martin Van Creveld
The cash that comes from selling your labour is vulgar and unacceptable for a gentleman … for wages are effectively the bonds of slavery.
~ Mary Beard
When you work you fulfill a part of earth's furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born. And in keeping yourself with labor you are in truth loving life, And to love life through labor is to be intimate with life's inmost secret.
~ Kahlil Gibran
Work is often the father of pleasure.
~ Voltaire
When you work you fulfil a part of earth's furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born. And in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life, And to love life through labour is to be intimate with life's inmost secret.
~ Kahlil Gibran
Love at first sight is one of the greatest labor-saving devices the world has ever seen
~ Robert Frost
I was in a temper fit to blow the lid off a kettle of boiling water. And who wouldn't be? Since sunup, I'd been doing chores. I'd milked the cow, hauled two buckets of water from the well, fed the chickens, and then fought the hens for their eggs. Now I was down on my knees, sweat-soaked and bug-bitten, yanking weeds from the vegetable patch. My hands were caked with mud, and my nose was burned as red as a strawberry.
~ Mary Downing Hahn
truck driver, but mostly earning
~ Mary Kay Andrews
The great paradox of automation is that the desire to eliminate human labor always generates new tasks for humans.
~ Unknown
It took organized labor and the collective action of workers to make full-time employment in the semi-automated world of industrial manufacturing inhabitable. Unfortunately, the valorization and validation of full-time employment also made it easier for corporate interests to position piecework and, later, other forms of temporary or contract labor as expendable, that is, work that did not warrant protections.
~ Unknown
When industries fixate on automating jobs away, they paradoxically spoke demand for ghost work, shredding the social contract between employer and worker in their wake.
~ Unknown
Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished, or if it does, as in the case of the tilled field, this product of human activity requires still more labor, incessant, tireless labor, to maintain its identity as a work of man.
~ Mary McCarthy
There was a game called "Work." and on of the most-often-repeated Soviet jokes described it perfectly: "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.
~ Masha Gessen
Robots and computers are taking people's jobs. Employers are taking people's weekends. Employment is becoming a dehumanizing process, as if humans existed to serve work, rather than work to serve humans.
~ Matt Haig