Quotes About Labor

Slaves, whose legal status was comparable to that of livestock, were expected to provide a farm owner with marketable children.

The South's 1860 population of 3,953,742 enslaved people comprised or made viable an estimated four billion dollars' worth of private property... ...Four billion dollars was more than double the $1.92 billion value of farmland in the eleven states that seceded.* Without labor Southern land lost what value it had, but even with labor Southern land in 1860 still was worth much less than land in the free states

These include the beliefs that the primary, if not the only, goal of human labor and thought is efficiency; that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment; that in fact human judgment cannot be trusted, because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity; that subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking; that what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value; and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts.

Hate was just a legend And war was never known The people worked together And they lifted many stones. They carried them to the flatlands And they died along the way But they built up with their bare hands What we still can't do today.

No race can prosper till it learns That there is as much dignity In tilling a field As in writing a poem. —Booker T. Washington

Without work men are utterly undone.

The thing most worth doing in this modern world [is to] create jobs that men can work at, and be proud of, and make money by their work.

She was always on her feet. Cooking. Washing. Ironing.

But there is one thing that determinists and instrumentalists can agree on: technological advances often mark turning points in history. New tools for hunting and farming brought changes in patterns of population growth, settlement, and labor.

All work is knowledge work. The carpenter's mind is no less animated and engaged than the actuary's. The architect's accomplishments depend as much on the body and its senses as the hunter's do.

sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy.

where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature… and all watched over by machines of loving grace. That

Average hourly wages were actually lower in 2018 ($22.65) than they had been forty-five years earlier in 1973 ($23.68 in today's prices), according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Since the end of the twentieth century, the United States has witnessed an ominous and growing divergence among three trends that should ordinarily move together: wealth, output, and employment.

How big is the "men without work" problem today? Consider a single fact: in 2015, the work rate (or employment-to-population ratio) for American males ages twenty-five–to–fifty-four was slightly lower than it had been in 1940, which was at the tail end of the Great Depression.

What the mechanical cotton picker did was make obsolete the sharecropper system, which arose in the years after the Civil War as the means by which cotton planters' need for a great deal of cheap labor was satisfied.

And what we've lost sight of is that performing manual labor with your hands is one of the most incredibly satisfying and positive things you can do.

But our Great Leader Chairman Mao told us, 'Learn to swim from swimming.' We should learn from taking part in revolutionary activities and from active labor.

I am credited with being one of the hardest workers and perhaps I am, if thought is the equivalent of labour, for I have devoted to it almost all of my waking hours. But if work is interpreted to be a definite performance in a specified time according to a rigid rule, then I may be the worst of idlers.

We ought to thank God for that. Yes, the man who tills the land is more worthy of respect than any.

We're all stupid, chasing after vanity!" ... "Really, it comes from idleness! Everything's near, everything's close at hand, yet we run to some far-off kingdom. Is it not life, if one is occupied, be it even in a remote corner? The pleasure indeed consists in labor. And nothing's sweeter than the fruit of one's own labors . . .

To work in the world is hard, to refrain from all unnecessary work is even harder.

D]emanding wages for housework (…) forced recognition of the fact that the domestic work which women do has economic value. But many feminists feel that this demand leaves untouched the sexual division of labour - indeed, measures like paid maternity leave (…) can be seen as a form of'wages for motherhood' but(…) it fixes women more rigidly into work defined as 'women's work'.