Popular quotes about Labor! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
When the press writes scare stories about the global labor supply draining jobs from rich to poor places, the story is usually presented as a "race to the bottom" simply in terms of wages. Capitalism supposedly looks for labor wherever labor is cheapest. This story is half wrong. A kind of cultural selection is also at work, so that jobs leave high-wage countries like the United States and Germany, but migrate to low-wage economies with skilled, sometimes overqualified workers.
Richard SennettCapital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior ofcapital, and deserves muchthe higher consideration.
Abraham LincolnAny labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.
Norbert WienerTemperance and labor are the two best physicians of man; labor sharpens the appetite, and temperance prevents from indulging to excess
Jean-Jacques RousseauI think it is a wise course for laborers to unite to defend their interests.... I think the employer who declines to deal with organized labor and to recognize it as a proper element in the settlement of wage controversies is behind the times.... Of course, when organized labor permits itself to sympathize with violent methods or undue duress, it is not entitled to our sympathy.
William Howard Taft... 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. StewartThe rising productivity of labor is a myth, a statistical illusion created by measuring combined output in terms of labor input.
Louis O. KelsoLabor will hurt. Probably a lot. But whether this is negative is another matter... A laboring woman can be in a great deal of pain, yet feel loved and supported and exhilarated by the creative forces flowing through her body and her ability to meet labor's challenges.
Henci GoerStrong, responsible unions are essential to industrial fair play. Without them the labor bargain is wholly one-sided. The parties to the labor contract must be nearly equal in strength if justice is to be worked out, and this means that the workers must be organized and that their organizations must be recognized by employers as a condition precedent to industrial peace.
Louis D. BrandeisTemporarily in 1934 I became a department head in the German Labor Front and dealt with the improvement of labor conditions in German factories. Then I was in charge of public works on the staff of Hess. I gave up both these activities in 1941.
Albert SpeerIt 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 MontaguUnless the concepts of work and play and reward for work change absolutely, women must continue to provide cheap labor, and even more, free labor exacted of right by an employer possessed of a contract for life, made out in his favor.
Germaine GreerMy 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 MametWhat was really interesting in his speech, which, by the way, had (inaudible) footnotes - the written version of it - which might be a personal record for Donald Trump - the source of a lot of his numbers on the free trade section of the speech came from an organization called the Economic Policy Institute, which was a think tank or is a think tank that was founded by labor unions to promote the labor unions' point of view on free trade agreements.
Avik RoyI deeply believe that if the Australian Labor Party, a party of which I have been a proud member for more than 30 years, is to have the best future for our nation, then it must change fundamentally its culture and to end the power of faceless men. Australia must be governed by the people, not by the factions.
Kevin RuddThe dimensions of a work of art are seldom realized by the author until the work is accomplished. It is like a flowering dream. Ideas grow, budding silently, and there are a thousand illuminations coming day by day as the work progresses. A seed grows in writing as in nature. The seed of the idea is developed by both labor and the unconscious, and the struggle that goes on between them.
Carson McCullersIt was the fall into history that enslaved us to the labor cycle, to the agricultural cycle. And notice how fiendish it is.
Terence McKennaThe labor unions shall have a square deal, and the corporations shall have a square deal, and in addition, all private citizens shall have a square deal.
Theodore RooseveltWell for the drones of the social hive that there are bees of an industrious turn, willing, for an infinitesimal share of the honey, to undertake the labor of its fabrication.
Thomas HoodThe country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor.
Helen KellerA pleasant natural environment is a good - a luxury good, philosophical good, a moral goody-good, a good time for all. Whatever, we want it. If we want something, we should pay for it, with our labor or our cash. We shouldn't beg it, steal it, sit around wishing for it, or euchre the government into taking it by force.
P. J. O'RourkeWe have military bases all over the world, and that's purely to protect our portfolio abroad.Our investments, and our production, our exploitation of cheap labor and raw materials. We're on the scene to do that, and the military is there to see that it happens.
Philip BerriganI'm pro-choice, pro-affirmative action, pro-environment and pro-labor. I was either going to be the loneliest Republican in America or I was going to be a happy Democrat.
Wesley ClarkWith 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 SmithThose who skim over the surface in a hit-or-miss fashion not only forfeit the best returns on their efforts, but are ever barred from the keen pleasure of seeing beauty in the results of their labor.
Roderick E. StevensScience has yet to isolate the Godiva Chocolate or Prada gene, but that doesn't mean your weakness for pricey swag isn't woven into your DNA. According to a new study of identical twins, it's less TV ads or Labor Day sales that make you buy the things you do than the tastes and temperaments that are already part of you at birth.
Jeffrey KlugerThe Road To Serfdom was written during WWII, and basically it's an anti-Nazi, anti-communist thing, but also it's an anti-Conservative and anti-Labor-party thing aimed at the British. He was an Austrian, writing in Britain. And I feel like now, I guess, everybody pays lip service to libertarian - and, indeed, many conservative - ideas, and yet they keep moving forward with an increasingly bureaucratic state. It shows itself in all sorts of little ways.
P. J. O'RourkeWe would labor earnestly to raise a believer in salvation by free will into a believer in salvation by grace, for we long to see all religious teaching built upon the solid rock of truth and not upon the sand of imagination. At the same time, our grand object is not the revision of opinions, but the regeneration of natures. We should bring men to Christ, not to our own particular views of Christianity.
Charles SpurgeonIt 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 RoyAll the time our union was progressing very nicely. There were lectures to make us understand what trades unionism is and our real position in the labor movement.
Rose SchneidermanWe're going to cut taxes, deregulate to try to create general pro-growth conditions, at the same time, much more than any other Republican ever before, [Donald Trump] is going to focus on trying to tighten the labor market directly through discouraging outsourcing and tightening up on immigration, all towards the goal of actually increasing wages, that's a new focus for the Republican Party and a very important one.
Rich LowryWhen, then, does plunder stop? It stops when it becomes more painful and more dangerous than labor.
Frederic BastiatThe [Ronald] Reagan administration told the business world that they were not going to enforce the labor laws.
Noam ChomskyThe labor movement was the principal force that transformeยญd misery and despair into hope and progress.
Martin Luther King, Jr.The fundamental rights of [humanity] are, first: the right of habitation; second, the right to move freely; third, the right to the soil and subsoil, and to the use of it; fourth, the right of freedom of labor and of exchange; fifth, the right to justice; sixth, the right to live within a natural national organization; and seventh, the right to education.
Albert SchweitzerI learned from the Macarturos. I had never been at a table with a labor organizer and a playwright and a performance artist and an anthropologist and a human rights lawyer. Usually at most gatherings, it's all writers. But suddenly I was at a table with all these different people and I learned from each of them, learned from the work they're doing, learned new ways to solve my problems.
Sandra CisnerosSyllogisms ะฐ la mode - If you are against labor racketeers, then you are against the working man. If you are against demagogues, then you are against democracy. If you are against Christianity, then you are against God. If you are against trying a can of Old Dr. Quack's Cancer Salve, then you are in favor of letting Uncle Julius die.
H. L. MenckenBeing a member of the labor force and a full-time parent means trying to manage against overwhelming odds in an unresponsive society.
Sheila KamermanBelieve me, the man who earns his bread by the sweat of his brow, eats oftener a sweeter morsel, however coarse, than he who procures it by the labor of his brains.
Washington IrvingCorporations can't have it both ways. They can't tell Americans how much they want us to buy their products, but then run abroad to avoid taxes or hire cheap labor. American corporations should pay their fair share of taxes and create decent-paying jobs here - not in China.
Bernie SandersComing from a working-class background, where my father did manual labor, was a good grounding; I was obsessed with getting a job or getting out of the house at 15.
Johnny Marr