Popular quotes about Labor! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
Capital is a result of labor, and is used by labor to assist it in further production. Labor is the active and initial force, and labor is therefore the employer of capital.
Henry GeorgeLabor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
Abraham LincolnWork is a means; it is not an end. And for any tasks that can be performed or eliminated by a capital instrument, human labor is not the best means... Furthermore, we have science, engineering and management - the three disciplines - that really plan and control the production of goods and services, trying to eliminate labor. Who the hell is government to come along and try to create labor? The people who are producing wealth are trying to eliminate toil, while the politicians are trying to create it.
Louis O. KelsoThe product of mental labor - science - always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.
Karl MarxBring on those tired, labor-plagued, competition-weary companies and ESOP will breathe new life into them. They will find ESOP better than Geritol. It will revitalize what is wrong with capitalism. It will increase productivity. It will improve labor relations. It will promote economic justice. It will save the economic system. It will make our form of government and our concept of freedom prevail over those who don't agree with us.
Russell B. LongTo constrain the brute force of the people, the European governments deem it necessary to keep them down by hard labor, poverty and ignorance, and to take from them, as from bees, so much of their earnings, as that unremitting labor shall be necessary to obtain a sufficient surplus to sustain a scanty and miserable life.
Thomas JeffersonThe riches of a country are to be valued by the quantity of labor its inhabitants are able to purchase, and not by the quantity of silver and gold they possess; which will purchase more or less labor, and therefore is more or less valuable, as is said before, according to its scarcity or plenty.
Benjamin FranklinโWe must make our choice between economy and liberty or confusion and servitude...If we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and comforts, in our labor and in our amusements...if we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy.
Thomas Jefferson... continual hard labor deadens the energies of the soul, and benumbs the faculties of the mind; the ideas become confined, the mind barren, and, like the scorching sands of Arabia, produces nothing; or, like the uncultivated soil, brings forth thorns and thistles. Again, continual hard labor irritates our tempers and sours our dispositions; the whole system become worn out with toil and fatigue; nature herself becomes almost exhausted, and we care but little whether we live or die.
Maria W. StewartI absolutely hate technology, and I'm computer illiterate, and I never use any labor-saving devices although I'm not convinced that a computer is a labor-saving device.
Chuck CloseHow can we live in freedom and maintain that we are entitled to *anything* that we can't get without the labor of others? Remember, if we are entitled to the labor of others, that makes slaves of those others.
Marilyn vos SavantIt is work, work that one delights in, that is the surest guarantor of happiness. But even here it is a work that has to be earned by labor in one's earlier years. One should labor so hard in youth that everything one does subsequently is easy by comparison.
Ashley MontaguWhatever there is of greatness in the United States, or indeed in any other country, is due to labor. The laborer is the author of all greatness and wealth. Without labor there would be no government, no leading class, and nothing to preserve.
Ulysses S. GrantLabor has been severely undermined, but that's happened before. In the 1920s, the labor movement was virtually crushed, in large part by Wilson's Red Scare, but it dramatically revived in the 1930s. It spearheaded the social-democratic New-Deal style changes which were beneficial to the country - not sufficient, but beneficial. That could happen again.
Noam ChomskyYou 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 ChomskyU.S. labor leaders will realize that automation can multiply man's wealth far more rapidly than it is multiplying at present and that automation will leave all men free to search and research... Realizing the direct competition with foreign industry on a straight labor basis will mean swiftly decreasing wages per hour and longer hours and decreasing buying power of the public.
R. Buckminster FullerLabor is not fighting for a larger slice of the national pie-labor is fighting for a larger pie.
Walter ReutherThere is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs.
Henry Ward BeecherI like that there's very little mystery in how the artwork is actually made. It's the labor and the focus and the precision that drives it to the next level.
Jacob HashimotoPoetry is the only life got, the only work done, the only pure product and free labor of man, performed only when he has put all the world under his feet, and conquered the last of his foes.
Henry David ThoreauWhat 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 HowittAs music migrates into our iPods, CD collections require less and less room, residing in our heads rather than resounding off the walls. The protracted labor of amassing a personal music library has lost its detective zeal.
James WolcottFires 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. Baldwin. . . the labor with which we give birth is simply a rehearsal for something we mothers must do over and over: turn ourselves inside out, and then let go.
Susan PiverIdleness is the enemy of the soul; and therefore the brethren ought to be employed in manual labor at certain times, at others, in devout reading.
Benedict of NursiaThe coarsest father gains a new impulse to labor from the moment of his baby's birth; he scarcely sees it when awake, and yet it is with him all the time. Every stroke he strikes is for his child. New social aims, new moral motives, come vaguely up to him.
Thomas Wentworth HigginsonThe free-trade idea, logically applied, will abolish usury; and with usury will disappear the chief bone of contention between labor and capital. But, just at this point, free-traders go over to the enemy; and many writers on political economy, in flat contradiction of the essential principles of that science, have made elaborate arguments to prove self-government in finance, impossible! What shall we think of men who, having dethroned kings, demolished popes, destroyed slave oligarchies and assailed tariff monopoly, advise submission to the most oppressive and dishonest of despotisms, Usury?
Ezra HeywoodWe 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 CiceroIt is estimated that raising the retirement age to 70 would cut the shortfall by about 36%. But this proposal has some drawbacks. Women and men who have worked jobs that require manual labor all of their lives may not physically be able to do work until they are 70 years old.
Steve IsraelManage the remarkable balance between acting from your heart and close to your gifts with completing the obligations that your labor and tasks require of you. Leverage opportunity AND seize joy.
Mary Anne RadmacherThe danger of these collaborations across disciplines is in having too strict of a division of labor - in my case, of getting stuck doing the music. When I make an album, I write music, I write lyrics, I come up with the visual design, etc. I get to do all of that stuff.
David GrubbsThe division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing.
Eduardo GaleanoWith this lodging and diet our extreme toil in bearing and planting palisades so strained and bruised us and our continual labor in the extremity of the heat had so weakened us, as were cause sufficient to have made us as miserable in our native country or any other place in the world
John SmithThe greater productivity of work under the division of labor is a unifying influence. It leads men to regard each other as comrades in a joint struggle for welfare, rather than as competitors in a struggle for existence. It makes friends out of enemies, peace out of war, society out of individuals.
Ludwig von MisesThe Sexual Revolution offered us women this deal: you can particiapate in higher education and the labor market, as long as you agree to chemically neuter yourselves during your twenties, and endure expensive, humiliating, and possibly dangerous infertility treatment during your thirties and forties.
Jennifer MorseSince once again, O Lord, in the steppes of Asia, I have no bread, no wine, no altar, I will raise myself above those symbols to the pure majesty of reality, and I will offer to you, I, your priest, upon the altar of the entire earth, the labor and the suffering of the world.
Pierre Teilhard de ChardinUnfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, because they lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force. Making it illegal to pay less than a given amount does not make a workerโs productivity worth that amountโand, if it is not, that worker is unlikely to be employed.
Thomas SowellA 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 ClevelandVanity costs money, labor, horses, men, women, health and peace, and is still nothing at last,--a long way leading nowhere.
Ralph Waldo EmersonClimbing is unadulterated hard labor. The only real pleasure is the satisfaction of going where no man has been before and where few can follow.
Annie Smith PeckToday in America, unions have a secure place in our industrial life. Only a handful of reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions and depriving working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice. I have no use for those - regardless of their political party - who hold some vain and foolish dream of spinning the clock back to days when organized labor was huddled, almost as a hapless mass. Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice.
Dwight D. Eisenhower