Labor Quotes

All my life I had thought that if you worked hard you would be rewarded. If you worked your ass off, there would be some reward for you. But now I knew that the reward was just the chance to work your ass off.

~ Don J. Snyder

For example, the citizens will live out the value of diligence in their enterprises. They will live out the value of prudence in their finances. They will live out the value of industry in the economy. They will live out the value of love in their neighbourhood. They will live out the value of dignity of labour in the market place, etc. All these will go a long way into propelling both the economy and political life of a nation to the greatest height possible.

~ Sunday Adelaja

Implicit in the stare of those eyes, the power of those knobbly hands, was labor's historic threat of violence against capital.

~ Edmund Morris

In Labor movements generally, success through violence can hardly be expected except in circumstances where success without violence is attainable.

~ Bertrand Russell

A man who goes into a restaurant and blatantly disrespects the servers shows a strong discontent with his own being. Deep down he knows that restaurant service is the closest thing he will ever experience to being served like a king.

~ Criss Jami

Despite all our amazing ability, ingenuity, technology and industry humans are the one species who have not mastered the art of simplicity.

~ Rasheed Ogunlaru

In recent years a smaller share of young adults has been employed than at any time since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking such trends in 1948. So it's not surprising that this generation of youthful protesters has a different focus for their grievances: the economy, stupid. But notice the targets they've chosen to demonize. It's all about class, not age. It's 1% versus 99%, not young versus old. Occupy Wall Street, not Occupy Leisure World.

~ Pew Research Center

Labor law violations are alive and well in the USA.

~ Steven Magee

America's indispensable working class existed as property beyond the realm of politics, leaving white Americans free to trumpet their love of freedom and democratic values.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Capitalism puts things (capital) higher than life (labor). Power follows from possession, not from activity.

~ Erich Fromm

Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can quietly become a power no government can suppress, a power than can transform the world.

~ Howard Zinn

But capital not only lives upon labour. Like a master, at once distinguished and barbarous, it drags with it into its grave the corpses of its slaves, whole hecatombs of workers, who perish in the crises.

~ Karl Marx

She was willing a little bit of sweated labour, incapable of betraying the slogan of her slavers, that since the customer or sucker was paying for his gutrot ten times what it cost to produce and five times what it cost to fling in his face, it was only reasonable to defer to his complaints up to but not exceeding fifty per cent of his exploitation.

~ Samuel Beckett

These diverse effects of slavery and freedom are easily understood: … the men in Kentucky [neither] have zeal nor enlightenment … cross over into Ohio in order to utilize their industry and to be able to exercise it without shame … in Kentucky, masters make slaves work without being obliged to pay them, but they receive little fruit from their efforts, while the money that they would give to free workers would be recovered with interest from the value of their labors.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The secret of wealth is that workers are systematically underpaid.

~ Julie Rivkin

Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian society. We kill people in the six-figure range (at least) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors. Our forty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing — or rather, they died for work. But work is nothing to die for.

~ Bob Black

Workers were required to stay six months, and even then permission to quit was not always granted. The factory held the first two months of every worker's pay; leaving without approval meant losing that money and starting over somewhere else. That was a fact of factory life you couldn't know from the outside: Getting into a factory was easy. The hard part was getting out.

~ Leslie T. Chang

Minimum standards to promote workers' wages, health and safety, to safeguard the community against pollution and degradation, and to ensure basic life goods for all as a basic contract for civil society was between 1945 and the mid-1970s, in fact, a rapidly evolving framework which inhibited the causes and effects of a corporate market system committed to an opposed goal.

~ John Mcmurtry

Fear not, the time is comingFear not, your bones are strongFear not, help is nearbyFear not, Gula is nearFear not, the baby is at the doorFear not, he will live to bring you honorFear not, the hands of the midwife are cleverFear not, the earth is beneath you Fear not, we have water and saltFear not, little motherFear not, mother of us all

~ Anita Diamant

On first hearing that little voice – as fine and friable, I felt, as cotton thread, the impact on my soul was that of the highest magnitude of earthquake, those that occur every hundred years, say, or every thousand. The old shell I called myself cracked and was swallowed by a sudden crevasse, and just as suddenly was lost in the commotion.

~ Antonella Gambotto-Burke

Though one’s occupation for his or her livelihood involves physical work or menial labor, it is held that the job carries dignity, compared to the jobs that involve more intellect than body.

~ Dignity

DIGNITY OF LABOR indicates that all types of jobs are respected equally, and no occupation is considered superior. Though one’s occupation for his or her livelihood involves physical work or menial labour, it is held that the job carries dignity, compared to the jobs that involve more intellect than body.

~ Dignity

The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.

~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The free worker receives a wage; the slave an education, food, care, clothing; the money that the master spends to keep the slave is drained little by little and in detail; one hardly perceives it.1

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

In accepting and defending the social institution of slavery, the Greeks were harder-hearted than we but clearer-headed; they knew that labor as such is slavery, and that no man can feel a personal pride in being a laborer. A man can be proud of being a worker – someone, that is, who fabricates enduring objects, but in our society, the process of fabrication has been so rationalized in the interests of speed, economy and quantity that the part played by the individual factory employee has become too small for it to be meaningful to him as work, and practically all workers have been reduced to laborers. It is only natural, therefore, that the arts which cannot be rationalized in this way – the artist still remains personally responsible for what he makes – should fascinate those who, because they have no marked talent, are afraid, with good reason, that all they have to look forward to is a lifetime of meaningless labor. This fascination is not due to the nature of art itself, but to the way in which an artists works; he, and in our age, almost nobody else, is his own master. The idea of being one’s own master appeals to most human beings, and this is apt to lead to the fantastic hope that the capacity for artistic creation is universal, something nearly all human beings, by virtue, not by some special talent, but due to their humanity, could do if they tried.

~ W.h. Auden

This is Doctor Norton. Who's calling?Step N’Wolfe- the owner of the Emerald Cascade Ranch on Green Valley Road. I have a horse in labor and the baby's already coming out of the horse's ass.You should of called sooner.

~ Giorge Leedy

It is certain that the labors of these early workers in the field of natural knowledge were brought to a standstill by the decay and disruption of the Roman Empire, the consequent disorganisation of society, and the diversion of men's thoughts from sublunary matters to the problems of the supernatural world suggested by Christian dogma in the Middle Ages. And, notwithstanding sporadic attempts to recall men to the investigation of nature, here and there, it was not until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that physical science made a new start, founding itself, at first, altogether upon that which had been done by the Greeks. Indeed, it must be admitted that the men of the Renaissance, though standing on the shoulders of the old philosophers, were a long time before they saw as much as their forerunners had done.

~ Thomas Henry Huxley

After Jacob had worked for Laban for seven years, do you know what happened? Laban fooled him and gave him his ugly daughter Leah. So to marry Rachel, Jacob was forced to work another seven years.So, you see, children, the Bible clearly teaches us you can never trust an employer.

~ Joseph Stein

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. &“These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people”– –

~ Abraham Lincoln

When the peasants and their song had vanished from his sight and hearing, a heavy feeling of anguish at his loneliness, his bodily idleness, his hostility to this world, came over him...It was all drowned in the sea of cheerful common labor. God had given the day, God had given the strength. Both day and strength had been devoted to labour and in that lay the reward...Levin had often admired this life, had often experienced a feeling of envy for the people who lived this life, but that day for the first time...the thought came clearly to Levin that it was up to him to change that so burdensome, idle, artificial and individual life he lived into this laborious, pure and common, lovely life.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Failing to listen to the woman is one of the biggest mistakes a practitioner can make.

~ Helen Varney

The Lord had given them the day and the Lord had given them the strength. And the day and the strength had been dedicated to labor, and the labor was its reward. Who was the labor for? What would be its fruits? These were irrelevant and idle questions.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Má leaves me but I'm not alone, and a terrifying thought creeps into my head. Family is now something I have created and not just something I was born into.

~ Thi Bui

I once heard that contractions are like this: a belt around your middle that is tightened agonizingly in ever elongating instances that arrange themselves in a pattern of pain.

~ Emma Rose Kraus

Only rarely do doctors in training have the opportunity to sit continuously with laboring women for hours. Most are taught to intervene in the normal process so often and so early that they have never witnessed a normal labor and birth.

~ Ina May Gaskin

Only after you have qualified yourself, you should then say that God will prosper your labor.

~ Sunday Adelaja

The idea of labor, of hard work, leading to increased productivity was so novel, so radical, in the overall span of Western history that most ordinary people, most of those who labored, could scarcely believe what was happening to them. Labor had been so long thought to be the natural and inevitable consequence of necessity and poverty that most people still associated it with slavery and servitude. Therefore any possibility of oppression, any threat to the colonists' hard earned prosperity, any hint of reducing them to the povery of other nations, was especially frightening; for it seemed likely to slide them back into the traditional status of servants or slaves, into the older world where labor was merely a painful necessity and not a source of prosperity.

~ Gordon S. Wood

Save for the fit of bizarre laughter at the end, the man seems so calm, sensible, rational. Duffy wishes he met more like him. A bit paranoid about this terrorism business, but frankly, he might be right. You never know who is around the bend to blow you up, destroy your symbols, set your embassy on fire, shit on your toilet seat, or send anthrax swimming into the subway air and into everyone's lungs.

~ Alex Kudera

The concept of dignity of labour took people off the street.

~ Sunday Adelaja

One of the major contributions of the Protestant faith to the world is the culture of dignity of labour.

~ Sunday Adelaja