Labor Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labor in it, but they labor in it because they excel.

William Hazlitt

Workmen's compensation, hours and conditions of labor are cold consolations, if there be no employment.

Calvin Coolidge

Hard manual labor revealed many things to Tolstoy. As soon as he began to do regular physical work the greater part of his luxurious habits and wants, which were so numerous when he had been physically idle, disappeared.

Robert Hunter (author)

Hayden had resigned as Opposition leader in 1983 as Malcolm Fraser was in the process of calling the election, but remained convinced that he would have won: I am not convinced the Labor Party could not win under my leadership. I believe a drover's dog could lead the Labor Party to victory the way the country is.

In the management of slave labor the gang system predominated. The great majority of owners, having at the most only one or two families of Negroes, had to work alongside their slaves and set the pace for them. Slavery did not make white labor unrespectable, but merely inefficient. The slave had a deliberateness of motion which no amount of supervision could quicken. If the owner got ahead of the gang they all would shirk behind his back.

W. Cleon Skousen

Western field-work conjures up images of struggle on horseback […]—toughing it out on one canteen a day as you labor up and down mountains. The value of a site is supposedly correlated with the difficulty of getting there. This, of course, is romantic drivel. Ease of access is no measure of importance. The famous La Brea tar pits are right in downtown Los Angeles. To reach the Clarkia lake beds, you turn off the main road at Buzzard's Roost Trophy Company and drive the remaining fifty yards right up to the site.

Stephen Jay Gould

The plain truth is that labor is the chief representative force that keeps the real special interests from dominating American political life.

Labor is not fighting for a larger slice of the national pie. Labor is fighting for a larger pie.

Labor's message then is this: we believe in a strong economy; we believe also in a fair go for all, not just for some.

Marx... Lenin... Mao Tse-Tung... These men were animated by the love of brother and this we must believe though their ends meant the seizure of power, and the building of mighty armies, the compulsion of concentration camps, the forced labor and torture and killing of tens of thousands, even millions.

In the postindustrial age, labor is seen as essentially uninvolved in the social process because there is no need for assertive labor.

Herbert Schiller

The alchemical tradition assumes that every physical art or science is a body of knowledge which exists only because it is ensouled by invisible powers and processes. Physical chemistry, as it is practiced in the modern world, is concerned principally with pharmaceutical or industrial research projects. It is confined within the boundaries of an all-pervading materialism, which binds labor to the advancement of physical objectives.

Manly Palmer Hall

Let us labor to add all needful guarantees for the more perfect security of free thought, free speech, and free press, pure morals, unfettered religious sentiments, and of equal rights and privileges to all men, irrespective of nationality, color, or religion.

Ulysses S. Grant

There is no labor from which most people shrink as they do from that of sustained and consecutive thought; it is the hardest work in the world

Wallace Wattles

What our generation failed to learn was the nobility of work. An honest day's labor. The worthiness of the man in the white socks who would pull out a picture of his grandkids from his wallet. For us, the factory would never do. And turning away from our birthright - our grandfather in the white socks - is the thing that ruined us.

It is unfortunate that we should find ourselves at this time the only disorganized group. Others have had the advantage of organization for centuries, so what seems to them unnecessary, from a racial point of view, becomes necessary to us, who have had to labor all along under the disadvantage of being scattered without a racial aim or purpose.

The working class must be emancipated by the working class.
Woman must be given her true place in society by the working class.
Child labor must be abolished by the working class.
Society must be reconstructed by the working class.
The working class must be employed by the working class.
The fruits of labor must be enjoyed by the working class.
War, bloody war, must be ended by the working class.

I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition; as it is now the capitalists use your heads and your hands.

The trade agreement has become a rather distinct feature of the American labor movement.... It is based on the idea that labor shall accept the capitalist system of production and make terms of peace with it.

Mary Ritter Beard

Consider that as a principle of love is the main principle in the heart of a real Christian, so the labor of love, is the main business of the Christian life.

Jonathan Edwards

I know the Leader of the Opposition [Tony Abbott] has an unhealthy kind of obsession with the so-called "faceless men in the Labor Party"; What he really should be obsessed about is the useless men sitting behind him.

Value is the life-giving power of anything; cost, the quantity of labor required to produce it; price, the quantity of labor which its possessor will take in exchange for it.

In all the history of organized labor, from the earliest times to the present day, no body of union workingmen ever served in a more humiliating and debasing role than that in which the railway unions appear at this very hour before the American people and the world.

Private property is a natural fruit of labor, a product of intense activity of man, acquired through his energetic determination to ensure and develop with his own strength his own existence and that of his family, and to create for himself and his own an existence of just freedom, not only economic, but also political, cultural and religious.

The white man has settled like a locust over Africa, and, like the locusts in early morning, cannot take flight for the heaviness of the dew on their wings. But the dew that weights the white man is the money that he makes from our labor.