Popular quotes about Labor! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
What about precarious labor? It's actually not the most efficient form of labor at all. They were much more efficient when they had loyalty to their workers and people were allowed to be creative and contribute - you know that what precarious labor does is that it's the best weapon ever made to depoliticize labor. They're always putting the political in front of the economic.
David GraeberBetween labor and play stands work. A man is a worker if he is personally interested in the job which society pays him to do; whatfrom the point of view of society is necessary labor is from his point of view voluntary play. Whether a job is to be classified as labor or work depends, not on the job itself, but on the tastes of the individual who undertakes it. The difference does not, for example, coincide with the difference between a manual and a mental job; a gardener or a cobbler may be a worker, a bank clerk a laborer.
W. H. AudenThe Lord had given them the day and the Lord had given them the strength. And the day and the strength had been dedicated to labor, and the labor was its reward. Who was the labor for? What would be its fruits? These were irrelevant and idle questions.
Leo TolstoyTemperance and labor are the two best physicians of man; labor sharpens the appetite, and temperance prevents from indulging to excess
Jean-Jacques RousseauMy task, as a member of this parliament and a 30-year member of the Australian Labor Party, as its former leader, as its former foreign minister and its former prime minister, is to now throw my every effort in securing Julia Gillard's re-election as Labor prime minister at the next election.
Kevin RuddI would have to ask the questioner. I haven't had a chance to ask the questioners the question they've been questioning. On the other hand, I firmly believe she'll be a fine secretary of labor. And I've got confidence in Linda Chavez. She is a - she'll bring an interesting perspective to the Labor Department.
George W. BushReduce the supply of black labor by colonizing the black laborer out of the country, and by precisely so much you increase the demand for and wages of white labor.
Abraham LincolnCentralize property in the hands of a few and the millions are under bondage to property - a bondage as absolute and deplorable as if their limbs were covered with manacles. Abstract all property from the hands of labor and you thereby reduce labor to dependence; and that dependence becomes as complete a servitude as the master could fix upon his slave.
Lewis Henry MorganI believe that labor is a blessing. It never was and never will be a curse. It is a blessed thing to labor for . . . the ones you love. It is a blessed thing to have an object in life - something to do - something to call into play your best thoughts, to develop your faculties and to make you a man.
Robert Green IngersollI once asked a distinguished artist what place he gave to labor in art. "Labor," he in effect said, "is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art." Turning then to another--"And you," I inquired, "what do you consider as the great force in art?" "Love," he replied. In their two answers I found but one truth.
Christian Nestell BoveeYou could increase farmworker wages significantly and not change the price to the consumer at all - for instance, if you redistribute how revenue is paid out across the food chain. Labor costs, particularly farm labor, is a tiny portion of the price we pay at the supermarket.
Anna LappeCapitalists have the tendency to move toward those countries in which there is plenty of labor available and at which labor is reasonable. And by the fact that they bring capital into these countries, they bring about a trend toward higher wage rates.
Ludwig von MisesLabor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.
Karl MarxMy dad was an immigrant kid and a Democrat and a Jew, and we didn't know any Republicans in our group. So I grew up Democratic. My dad was a labor lawyer - a very hardworking guy, a one-horse labor lawyer - and then I went to hippie college and lived in the bubble.
David MametYou take a look at the history of African Americans in the US. There's been about thirty years of relative freedom. There was a decade after the Civil War and before north/south compact essentially recriminalized black life. During the Second World War there was a need for free labor so there was a freeing up of the labor force. Blacks benefitted from it.
Noam ChomskyWe are the necessary element since we expend nothing. Management can create its own capital -- the profits. Its business would grow and profits increase. Labor would prosper as well, while the price of the product would remain constant, the prosperity of industry, labor and management would continually increase. We Jews glory in the fact that the stupid goy have never realized that we are the parasites consuming an increasing portion of production while the producers are continually receiving less and less.
Harold Wallace RosenthalThus a new way of finding fluidity will inevitably be imposed on management and labor alike. The profit-sharing, or "progress" sharing union contract is the only possible way of satisfying labor and the consumer without saddling industry with fixed costs that in depression periods can kill off marginal companies like flies.
John ChamberlainI find it remarkable that virtually all of the large difference in labor supply between France and the United States is due to differences in tax systems. I expected institutional constraints on the operation of labor markets and the nature of the unemployment benefit system to be more important. I was surprised that the welfare gain from reducing the intratemporal tax wedge is so large.
Edward C. PrescottLabor is not fighting for a larger slice of the national pie-labor is fighting for a larger pie.
Walter ReutherIf you are going to abolish slavery, that opens up all these other questions: what system of labor is going to replace slave labor? What system of race relations is going to replace the race relations of slavery? Who is going to have power in the post-war South? The Emancipation Proclamation doesn't answer that question, but it throws [it] open.
Eric FonerThere is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; alwayswe are invited to work.
Ralph Waldo EmersonThe candidate out front on Labor Day has historically been the one who stayed ahead in November.
Peter JenningsWhat a glorious spectacle is that of the labor of man upon the earth! It includes everything in it that is glorious. Look around and tell me what you see, that is worth seeing, that is not the work of your hands and the hands of your fellows;--the multitudes of all ages.
Alfred William HowittThe people's instincts are still right. You see them come to the rescue of someone-a child who falls down a well-hundreds of people rush to help, and labor and equipment are volunteered without any thought of who's going to pay for it. This is a basic feeling in Americans. They don't stand back in such a circumstance and ask what the government's going to do about it.
Ronald ReaganFires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.
James A. BaldwinThat generation really has to fight for a new political language, social movements, and alliances with students from other countries. They have to convince labor, parents, and the general public that the fight over higher education is a fight that benefits everyone in a sustainable democracy and not just faculty and students.
Henry GirouxReaders soon tire of prefaces, and skip them, and so the labor of writing them is lost.
Sarah Josepha HaleWe rejoice in the joys of our friends as much as we do our own, and we are equally grieved at their sorrows. Wherefore the wise people will feel toward their friends as they do toward themselves, and whatever labor they would encounter with a view to their own pleasure, they will encounter also for the sake of their friends.
Marcus Tullius CiceroThe essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.
George OrwellOnly those who live on the labor of the ignorant are the enemies of science. Real love and real religion are in no danger from science. The more we know the safer all good things are.
Robert Green IngersollWhen we look at women, we have to look at the significance of their work in a different way from the way we look at it with men. Women have more often worked within the home, working equally as hard, I would argue, but not always out there where they're counted, not always up there in the labor unions, certainly not in leadership positions.
Adele Logan AlexanderProperty, the right to enjoy the fruits of one's labor, the right to work, to develop, to exercise one's faculties, according to one's own understanding, without the state intervening otherwise than by its protective action; this is what is meant by liberty
Frederic BastiatThe seeming antagonism between capital and labor is the result of deceptive appearance.
Leland StanfordLabor is the only prayer that Nature answers: It is the only prayer that deserves an answerโgood, honest, noble work.
Robert Green IngersollI never thought I would be one of those wacky chicks who say, 'I loved my labor,' but I loved every part of it. It was the best day of my life.
Sarah ShahiA master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which.
Franรงois-Renรฉ de ChateaubriandThe laws should be rigidly enforced which prohibit the immigration of a servile class to compete with American labor, with no intention of acquiring citizenship, and bringing with them and retaining habits and customs repugnant to our civilization.
Grover ClevelandI begin to understand that failure is its own reward. It is in the effort to close the distance between the work imagined and the work achieved wherein it is to be found that the ceaseless labor is the freedom of play, that whatโs at stake isnโt a reflection in the mirror of fame but the escape from the prison of the self.
Lewis H. LaphamIt is difficult not to wonder whether that combination of elements which produces a machine for labor does not create also a soul of sorts, a dull resentful metallic will, which can rebel at times.
Pearl S. BuckIn activity we must find our joy as well as glory; and labor, like everything else that is good, is its own reward.
Edwin Percy WhippleAh, what is more blessed than to put cares away, when the mind lays by its burden, and tired with labor of far travel we have come to our own home and rest on the couch we longed for? This it is which alone is worth all these toils.
CatullusIt might be the first time - certainly the first time in my lifetime that a major policy address by a Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump so heavily relied on data and studies from a labor-union-backed think tank.
Avik RoyIn a capitalist world, the word capital has taken on more and more uses. . . . human capital, for instance, which is what labor accumulates through education and work experience. Human capital differs from the classic kind in that you can't inherit it, and it can only be rented, not bought or sold.
Kim StanleyAll of us were born at some point, and at some point, unfortunately, most people get sick or need to care for a loved one who is sick. I mean, that's just acknowledging the reality of how we have to have labor market policies that allow people to have families, which is why we work in the first place. We have to have policies that allow us to be able to focus on our jobs and be highly productive employees. You need to be able to have policies that allow us to adjudicate between those two.
Heather BousheyMarkets are interested in profits and profits only; service, quality, and general affluence are different functions altogether. The universal, democratic prosperity that Americans now look back to with such nostalgia was achieved only by a colossal reigning in of markets, by the gargantuan effort of mass, popular organizations like labor unions and of the people themselves, working through a series of democratically elected governments not daunted by the myths of the market.
Thomas Frank