Labor Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Legislators who are of even average intelligence stand out among their colleagues.... A cultured college president has become as much a rarity as a literate newspaper publisher. A financier interested in economics is as exceptional as a labor leader interested in the labor movement. For the most part our leaders are merely following out in front; they [only] marshal us in the way that we are going.

He [Tolstoy] seems to have felt somehow that social evolution was standing in his way. He did not like the division of labor. He hated all forms of commerce and trade. The State was an abomination in his eyes. He wanted it abolished and with it, indeed, all of modern society based upon machine industry. With Rousseau, he would go back to the primitive state.

Robert Hunter (author)

Attorney-General Sir John Holker: The labor of two days, then, is that for which you ask two hundred guineas? Whistler: No; — I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.

James McNeill Whistler

Historically, labor unions arose when people had gotten a taste of a different lifestyle and were willing to pay a lot more for their basic livelihood and had gotten into a fix they couldn't get out of – because they had accepted the unacceptable to begin with. Accepting something you have to form a labor union to fight after the fact only tells me that people were acting against their own best (or even good) interests for a long time. I don't see any rational, coherent explanation for this sort of behavior in humans, but it's all over the place.

The ability to make a truly artistic photograph is not acquired off-hand, but is the result of an artistic instinct coupled with years of labor.

Alfred Stieglitz

The myth of the first world is that
development is wealth and technology progress.
It is all rubbish.
It means that you are no longer human beings
but only labor.
It means that the land you live on is not earth
but only property.

Karen Tei Yamashita

I 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.

As long as ministers and laymen labor under the delusion that contemporary Christianity is the same religion that Jesus practiced they will remain immunized against his way of life and will lack the vision.

We have never pretended to be a small business party. The Labor Party has never pretended that.

Ye are born, all of you, to a royal birthright. Scorn not the poor, thou wealthy — his toil is nobler than thy luxury. Fret not at the rich, thou poor — his beneficence is comelier than thy murmuring. Join hands, both of you, rich and poor together, as ye toil in the brotherhood of God's great harvest-field — heirs of a double heritage — thou poor, of thy kingly labor — thou rich, of thy queenly charity — and let heaven bear witness to the bridal.

William Morley Punshon

To remember the loneliness, the fear and the insecurity of men who once had to walk alone in huge factories, beside huge machines—to realize that labor unions have meant new dignity and pride to millions of our countrymen—human companionship on the job, and music in the home—to be able to see what larger pay checks mean, not to a man as an employee, but as a husband and as a father—to know these things is to understand what American labor means.

Adlai Stevenson II

Federal laws, including those that made so many people immigrate without documents, gutted the enforcement power of the Department of Labor and created a lower minimum wage for tipped workers than for everybody else, reinforcing the industry's

Burning 2000 people took about 24 hours in the five stoves. Usually we could manage to cremate only about 1700 to 1800. We were thus always behind in our cremating because as you can see it was much easier to exterminate by gas than to cremate, which took so much more time and labor.

… I often feel literally nauseated upon hearing works representative of the "new simplicity", or of the "new romantic" genre, works which, by aiming low, targeting only the mock-astral plane of musical yuppiedom, ignore the very dangers which make genuine art both human and transcendent. Fortunately, we are witnessing the growth of a grass-roots movement comprised of composers and performers who, having peeked over the fence surrounding this dungheap, have determined that shovelling shit is not to be their fate, and who are lovingly dedicating their lives to the seemingly endless, often agonizing labor which the production of challenging new works entails.

Care and labor are as much correlated to human existence as shadow is to light...

Harriet Beecher Stowe

The homestead policy was established only after long and earnest resistance; experience proves its wisdom. The lands in the hands of industrious settlers, whose labor creates wealth and contributes to the public resources, are worth more to the United States than if they had been reserved as a solitude for future purchasers.

In doing so, socialist, labor, and social democratic parties contributed to — though they were not the sole authors of — the development of the mixed economies that exist in advanced countries today. If these mixed economies are a far cry from the centralized systems that were created in Eastern Europe under Leninist rulers, they are also very far from the classical liberal model of a self-regulating market economy. If we look to the most advanced economies for guidance, then we should not allow ourselves to be misled by dogma about "free markets."

The Labor Party is not going to profit from having these proven unsuccessful people around who are frightened of their own shadow and won't get out of bed in the morning unless they've had a focus group report to tell them which side of bed to get out.

The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.

Jürgen Habermas

You can see China still cannot offer any real value to the world except as cheap labor, manufacturer, and its own so-called stability. Besides that, I don't see any creative values and creative mind or thinking [that] can be announced from China. So this is the struggle China has to face in the next decades.

I am very sure that any man of common understanding may, by culture, care, attention, and labor, make himself what- ever he pleases, except a great poet.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

If we would gain light either on the theory or the practice of religion: i. We must sincerely desire the light. 2. We must use the light we already have. 3. We must patiently seek light in the double way of prayer and rational inquiry. Never, as long as the world stands, will any religiously benighted soul thus patiently desire and pray and labor for the break of day, without at last seeing the eyelids of the morn unsealed, and the painfully dusky east gradually redden into the sun.

Enoch Fitch Burr

The 'survival of the fittest' is beneficently inevitable; the capitalist is powerless against labor, unless the State... steps in, and helps him catch and fleece his victims. The old plea of despotism, that liberty is unsafe, reappears now in the mistaken notion that competition is hostile to labor.

This nation, this generation, in this hour has man's first chance to build a Great Society, a place where the meaning of man's life matches the marvels of man's labor.

Lyndon B. Johnson

The law-abiding citizen by his labor serves both himself and his fellow man and thereby integrates himself peacefully into the social order. The robber, on the other hand, is intent, not on honest toil, but on the forcible appropriation of the fruits of others' labor.

Ludwig von Mises