Quotes About Productivity

Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.

Like depression, the effects of anxiety extend beyond the body and mind to the entire being, affecting not only one's sense of well-being but also health, longevity, work productivity, relationships—the entire human condition.

Nobody can think straight who does not work. Idleness warps the mind.

Business is never so healthy as when, like a chicken, it must do a certain amount of scratching around for what it gets.

Don't find fault, find a remedy; anybody can complain

Chop your own wood and it will warm you twice

There is joy in work. There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something.

We try to pay a man what he is worth and we are not inclined to keep a man who is not worth more than the minimum wage.

Where people work longest and with least leisure, they buy the fewest goods. No towns were so poor as those of England where the people, from children up, worked fifteen and sixteen hours a day. They were poor because these overworked people soon wore out -- they became less and less valuable as workers. Therefore, they earned less and less and could buy less and less.

That the Devil finds work for idle hands to do is probably true. But there is a profound difference between leisure and idleness.

It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others waste.

Time waste differs from material waste in that there can be no salvage.

If a device would save in time 10% or bring about results worth 10% then its absence is worth 10%.

You are not saving when you are taking away from yourself becoming more productive. You are really taking away from your ultimate capital.

You are not "saving" when you prevent yourself from becoming more productive.

I think it should not be otherwise in industry. The men are there to get the greatest possible amount of work done and to receive the highest possible pay. If each man were permitted to act in his own way, production would suffer and therefore pay would suffer. Any one who does not like to work in our way may always leave.

Every time you can so arrange that one man will do the work of two, you so add to the wealth of the country that there will be a new and better job for the man who is displaced.

The man who does not get a certain satisfaction out of his day's work is losing the best part of his pay.

The fact that a piece of work is now being done by nine men which used to be done by ten men does not mean that the tenth man is unemployed. He is merely not employed on that work, and the public is not carrying the burden of his support by paying more than it ought on that work—for after all, it is the public that pays!

There is no reason why a man who is willing to work should not be able to work and to receive the full value of his work. There is equally no reason why a man who can but will not work should not receive the full value of his services to the community. He should most certainly be permitted to take away from the community an equivalent of what he contributes to it. If he contributes nothing he should take away nothing. He should have the freedom of starvation. We

There is this difference where a man works for himself, or where, when working for an employer, he takes his wages in kind, his wages depend upon the result of his labor. Should that, from any misadventure, prove futile, he gets nothing. When he works for an employer, however, he gets his wages anyhow—they depend upon the performance of the labor, not upon the result of the labor.

Hitherto, it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being. John Stuart Mill.

If each laborer in performing the labor really creates the fund from which his wages are drawn, then wages cannot be diminished by the increase of laborers, but, on the contrary, as the efficiency of labor manifestly increases with the number of laborers, the more laborers, other things being equal, the higher should wages be.

Capital is but a form of labor, and its distinction from labor is in reality but a subdivision, just as the division of labor into skilled and unskilled would be.