Labor Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Prudence, patience, labor, valor; these are the stars that rule the career of mortals.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Black women survived the rigors of slavery to demand the rights of their race and of their sex. They rose above the most demeaning forms of labor and demanded to be called by their last names. Black women forged humane communities out of rough settlements. They converted the rock of double oppression into a steppings tone.

What is memory but the repository of things doomed to be forgotten, so you must have History. You must have labor to invent History. Being faithful to all that happens to you of significance, recording days, dates, events, names, sights not relying merely upon memory which fades like a Polaroid print where you see the memory fading before your eyes like time itself retreating.

Joyce Carol Oates

To get a man soundly saved it is not enough to put on him a pair of new breeches, to give him regular work, or even to give him a University education. These things are all outside a man, and if the inside remains unchanged you have wasted your labor. You must in some way or other graft upon the man's nature a new nature, which has in it the element of the Divine.

Say what we will, you may be sure that ambition is an error; its wear and tear of heart are never recompensed, -it steals away the freshness of life, -it deadens its vivid and social enjoyments, -it shuts our souls to our own youth, -and we are old ere we remember that we have made a fever and a labor of our raciest years.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Don't labor forever over the question of how or if you can do it. Studies have shown that the most successful people make decisions rapidly because they are clear on their values and what they really want for their lives.

Anthony Robbins

Only with the tools of production in their own hands could the workers ever hope to control their own lives and receive the fruits of their labor.

Ella Reeve Bloor

And it is understandable, if it were possible to print finished paintings, as Hercules Segers has done with landscapes in our time, that it would no longer be easy to find anyone who would want to devote much labor and time to producing his works.

Samuel Dirksz van Hoogstraten

It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the ferrets of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won.

Emancipation of human labor from economic servitude and exploitation, i.e., from organizations of production in which the conditions of work are determined by a master class who own the means of production, and in which the fruits of work are alienated from workers to the benefit of masters.

The 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 Cleveland

The Nazi appealed to the socialist traditions of German labor, declaring the worker 'a pillar of the community,' and the 'bourgeois'—along with the traditional aristocracy—a doomed class. Hitler, who told associates that he was a 'socialist,' had the party adopt the red flag and, on coming to power, declared May 1 a national holiday; Nazi Party members were ordered to address one another as 'comrades (Genossen). His conception of the part was, like Lenin's, that of a militant organization a Kampfbund, or 'Combat League.'

There never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other.

John C. Calhoun

To create a little flower is the labor of ages.

I know that if the peace movement takes its message boldly to the Negro people a powerful force can be secured in pursuit of the greatest goal of all mankind. And the same is true of labor and the great democratic sections of our population.

Experience shows that nothing is operated with less economy and with more waste of labor and material of every kind than public services and undertakings. Private enterprise on the other hand naturally induces the owner to work with the greatest economy in his own interest.

Ludwig von Mises

People who labor all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their time-even when hard at work.

Marcus Aurelius

Private property works like circuitry in electronics, or piping in hydraulics. It conveys wages to the owners of labor power, as well as the various forms of nonwage property income to the owners of capital. In itself, it is no more responsible for maldistribution of purchasing power than the science of bookkeeping is responsible for bankruptcy.

A thousand wheels of labor are turned by dear affections, and kept in motion by self-sacrificing endurance; and the crowds that pour forth in the morning and return at night are daily procession of love and duty.

Edwin Hubbell Chapin

If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor.

And for that they were rich,/And robbed the poor; and for that they were strong,/And scourged the weak; and for that they made laws/Which turned the sweat of labor's brow to blood! - /For these their sins the nations cast them out.

Is that all? The mountain in labor has brought forth a mouse.

May Agnes Fleming

Only those who live on the labor of the ignorant are the enemies of science. Real love and real religion are in no danger from science. The more we know the safer all good things are.

Robert G. Ingersoll

Workers do not strike every day, they cannot do that the way they function in the capitalist economy. The way they have to live by selling their labor power makes that impossible.

Much of the criticism of economic globalization has centered on factory labor abuses. But the majority of the world's poor are not employed in factories; they are self-employed - as peasant farmers, rural peddlers, urban hawkers, and small producers, usually involved in agriculture and small trade in the world's vast "informal" economy.

David Bornstein (author)