LABOR QUOTES IV
quotations about labor
Under the regime of property, labor is not a condition, but a privilege.
PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON
What is Property?
The lot of man is ceaseless labor, Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder.
T. S. ELIOT
The Rock
It has been said "that he who works prays;" and certainly one of the best prayers that a working man with a large and young family can offer up is to steadily stick to his work. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Saviour of the world, was the son of a working carpenter, and it is believed by many Theologians that our Saviour followed that trade (whatever it was in those days) until he was thirty years of age. If then God's only Son, the right hand of the throne of heaven, the King of men, the only sinless, spotless, perfect child, youth, and man, was a labourer, IS THERE NOT DIGNITY IN LABOUR? The happiest man is the working man, and if there is any real happiness in this world it is in the neat but humble cottage, where peace and love reign, and the industrious wife is the true helpmate of the working man; and not in the palace, where the bloated aristocrat, recovering from an attack of gout or some other punishment for excess, sits, trying to kill time, with bleared eyes (and often of idiotic expression) gazing into vacancy, surrounded by all that wealth can buy or human ingenuity contrive to make him comfortable, but with all not happy.
T. AUGUSTUS FORBES LEITH
"On the Dignity of Labour", Short Essays
Labor is a category unique to capitalism. In capitalism, labor is the touchstone of social life: it is a material property of human actors, bearing physical, nearly tangible qualities. It is also the touchstone, the foundation, of subjectivity and morality. Labor does not occupy such a position outside capitalism.
MARTHA LAMPLAND
The Object of Labor: Commodification in Socialist Hungary
Capital is a result of labor, and is used by labor to assist it in further production. Labor is the active and initial force, and labor is therefore the employer of capital.
HENRY GEORGE
Progress and Poverty
There is an abandonment, an escape, that physical labor bestows.
STEVEN GOULD
Jumper
Think about these imprints left by the material processes of work as the evidence of our presence on the earth, and ... think about how contemporary human beings, living in a western urban environment, can relate to the metaphysics of the labor which enables our lives.
JACKIE NICKERSON
"Exhibit: Jackie Nickerson", Crave, March 14, 2016
There can be no general prosperity where labor has small reward.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
Implicit in the stare of those eyes, the power of those knobbly hands, was labor's historic threat of violence against capital.
EDMUND MORRIS
Theodore Rex
The lottery of honest labor, drawn by time, is the only one whose prizes are worth taking up and carrying home.
THEODORE PARKER
Lessons from the World of Matter and the World of Man
To assert that labor is not the destiny of man, and that it cannot become for him a source of happiness, is to calumniate the Creator.
C. VIGOUREUX
attributed, Day's Collacon
Apparently your labor is the opposite of your sexuality in California: You can sell it, but you can't give it away for free.
SCOTT SHACKFORD
"California Destroys Winery Over Use of Volunteers", Reason, September 16, 2014
What is acquired without labor is seldom worth acquiring at all.
ANNE RADCLIFFE
attributed, Day's Collacon
Sulky labor, and the labor of sorrow are little worth: if you could only shed tranquility over the conscience and infuse joy into the soul, you would do more to make the man a thorough worker than if you could lend him the force of Hercules, or the hundred arms of Briareus.
WILBERFORCE
attributed, Day's Collacon
It is only by labor that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labor can be happy; and the two cannot be separated with impunity.
JOHN RUSKIN
On the Nature of Gothic Architecture
Labour is the purgatory of the erring.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Lucretia; or, The children of Night
I would have labor a blessing, as God designed it should be; and not have it made a curse by oppression.
C. E. LESTER
attributed, Day's Collacon
For Marx, labor is living, the source of life, because human life is the survival of a biological and social subject through the material processes of production.
PHENG CHEAH
What Is a World?
Having a place where your labor is valued, your needs are met, and where you have friends shouldn't be as revolutionary as it is.
TANYA
"National Communities Conference Held at Twin Oaks", Mother Earth News, October 5, 2015
His labor is a chant,
His idleness a tune;
Oh, for a bee's experience
Of clovers and of noon!
EMILY DICKINSON
"The Bee"