Labor Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

To the Legislative Assembly belongs the consideration of measures which may best tend to the development of the resources of the Territory. Oregon possesses within herself many of these, which with enterprise and industry will most surely render her a wealthy, powerful, and prosperous State. She has a fertile soil, and genial climate; she has [vast] forests and abundant fisheries, unlimited water power, pastures upon which even during winter, innumerable flocks and herds can subsist, with no other care than the mere herding; and prairies which could with only moderate labor, furnish the whole of our Pacific Territories with bread.

Slavery is an obscenity. It is not just stealing someone's labor; it is the theft of an entire life.

What is there glorious in the world, that is not the product of labor, either of the body or of the mind?

Somehow, white South Africans believed that black labor was like a lawn mower: you could have it around, and when you didn't need it, you could hide it in its little shed where it would be good and quiet-until you needed it again.

Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor.

Marshall McLuhan

There 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 Beecher

Work only can keep even kings respectable. And when a king is a king indeed, it is an honorable office to give tone to the manners and morals of a nation; to set the example of virtuous conduct, and restore in spirit the old schools of chivalry, in which the young manhood may be nurtured to real greatness. Work and wages will go together in men's minds, in the most royal institutions. We must ever come to the idea of real work. The rest that follows labor should be sweeter than the rest which follows rest.

There is scarcely anything that is right that we cannot hope to accomplish by labor and perseverance. But the first must be earnest and the second unremitting.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

I have, through my whole life, held the practice of slavery in such abhorrence, that I have never owned a negro or any other slave, though I have lived for many years in times, when the practice was not disgraceful, when the best men in my vicinity thought it not inconsistent with their character, and when it has cost me thousands of dollars for the labor and subsistence of free men, which I might have saved by the purchase of negroes at times when they were very cheap.

Put off thy cares with thy clothes; so shall thy rest strengthen thy labor, and so thy labor sweeten thy rest.

Francis Quarles

One grasps incomparably more things in boredom than by labor, effort being the mortal enemy of meditation.

We must distinguish between the kind of structural transformation that would leave in place (even increase) the realities of the exploitation of labor, and one that would undo this kind of exploitation or at least radically reduce it

Immanuel Wallerstein

For in a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and valor. Of the endless fluid passage of the humanity through endless time. And of those who labor and of those who - one word- love. His soul expanded. But for a moment only. For in him, he felt a warning, a shaft of terror.

Carson McCullers

At this point, an urgent question arises: … Is it our duty to seek to become a thorough and complete human being, one quite sufficient unto himself; or, on the contrary, to be only a part of a whole, the organ of an organism? Briefly, is the division of labor, at the same time that it is a law of nature, also a moral rule of human conduct; and, if it has this latter character, why and in what degree?

Émile Durkheim

... organized labor... rushes to support the party without demanding a turn away from corporatism toward workers' needs. This is the logic of the lesser of two evils. It tethers labor to a relentless slide deeper into the corporate power pits year after year.

You're a slave in your own country, White Man. Each year you get to keep less of the fruits of your labor; each year it gets more difficult to carry the burden the aliens have placed upon you; each year the cheap labor of aliens makes your future less secure; each year you retreat a few steps more into the world of slavery.

George Lincoln Rockwell