Labor Quotes - Page 19

• If CEOs insist that middle class Americans compete with cheap foreign labor, why not outsource the jobs of CEOs? If business is all about cost, they should be the first to volunteer.

  Lou Dobbs

  Jobs, Class, Volunteer

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• He who first shortened the labor of Copyists by device of Movable Types was disbanding hired armies and cashiering most Kings and Senates, and creating a whole new Democratic world: he had invented the Art of printing.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Art, Kings, Army

  'Sartor Resartus' (1834) bk. 1, ch. 5

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• Chess may be the deepest, least exhaustible of pastimes, but it is nothing more. As for a chess genius, he is a human being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise.

  George Steiner

  Genius, May, Littles

  "The Sporting Scene: White Knights of Rekjavik". Book by George Steiner, 1972.

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• In our own time we have seen domination spread over the social landscape to a point where it is beyond all human control. Compared to this stupendous mobilization of materials, of wealth, of human intellect, of human labor for the single goal of domination, all other recent human achievements pale to almost trivial significance. Our art, science, medicine, literature, music and charitable acts seem like mere droppings from a table on which gory feasts on the spoils of conquest have engaged the attention of a system whose appetite for rule is utterly unrestrained.

  Murray Bookchin

  Art, Medicine, Goal

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• The most important thing in industry is the person who does the industry, which is the worker... Labor is the only source of wealth.

  Eli Siegel

  Important, Doe, Wealth

  Eli Siegel (1970). “Goodbye Profit System: 8 Aesthetic Realism Lectures May 22 to July 10, 1970, Reported by Students of Aesthetic Realism”

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• A library is but the soul's burial ground; it is the land of shadows. Yet one is impressed with the thought, the labor, and the struggle, represented in this vast catacomb of books. Who could dream, by the placid waters that issue from the level mouths of brooks into the lake, all the plunges, the whirls, the divisions, and foaming rushes that had brought them down to the tranquil exit? And who can guess through what channels of disturbance, and experiences of sorrow, the heart passed that has emptied into this Dead Sea of books?

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Dream, Struggle, Book

  Henry Ward Beecher (1855). “Star Papers: Or, Experiences of Art and Nature”, p.54, New York : Boston : J.C. Derby ; Phillips, Sampson & Company

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• You almost had to live through it to really know the gut ripping misery of the depression during the early thirties which led to labor's bloodiest and most violent days.

  Jimmy Hoffa

  Misery, Violent, Guts

  "Hoffa The Real Story" by Jimmy Hoffa, (p. 27), 1975.

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• He's not just the most powerful man in labor," Robert Kennedy had said in the wake of Hoffa's announcement; "he's the most powerful man in the country, next to the President.

  Jimmy Hoffa

  Country, Powerful, Men

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• Every one who has a heart and eyes sees that you, working men, are obliged to pass your lives in want and in hard labor, which is useless to you, while other men, who do not work, enjoy the fruits of your labor that you are the slaves of these men, and that this ought not to exist.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Heart, Eye, Men

  "To the Working People". Complete Works, translated by Leo Wiener, Volume 24, p. 129, 1905.

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• Division of labor is a justification for sloth.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Division Of Labor, Sloth, Justification

  "Path of Life". Book by Leo Tolstoy, Translated by M. Cote (2002), p.79, 1909.

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• There is no right more universal and more sacred, because lying so near the root of existence, than the right of men to their own labor.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Lying, Men, Roots

  Henry Ward Beecher (1863). “Freedom and War: Discourses on Topics Suggested by the Times”, p.320, Gale Cengage Learning

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• The life of God - the life which the mind apprehends and enjoys as it rises to the absolute unity of all things - may be described as a play of love with itself; but this idea sinks to an edifying truism, or even to a platitude, when it does not embrace in it the earnestness, the pain, the patience, and labor, involved in the negative aspect of things.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  God, Pain, Play

  "The Phenomenology of Spirit". Book by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1807.

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• Just as there can be little doubt that labor unions are a significant political force, neither can there be much question that this political force is a by-product of the purely industrial activities that unions regard as their major function.

  Mancur Olson

  Political, Doubt, Unions

  Mancur OLSON (2009). “THE LOGIC OF COLLECTIVE ACTION”, p.136, Harvard University Press

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• When profits are pursued by geographic interchange of goods, so that commerce for profit becomes the central mechanism of the system, we usually call it "commercial capitalism." In such a system goods are conveyed from ares where they are more common (and therefore cheaper) to areas where they are less common (and therefore less cheap). This process leads to regional specialization and to division of labor, both in agricultural production and in handicrafts.

  Carroll Quigley

  Division Of Labor, Common, Process

  "The Evolution of Civilizations". Book by Carroll Quigley, Second Edition 1979, Chapter 8, Canaanite and Minooan Civilizations, p. 241, 1961.

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• To me, it appears no unjust simile to compare the affairs of this great Continent to the mechanism of a clock, each state representing some one or other of the smaller parts of it which they are endeavoring to put in fine order without considering how useless & unavailing their labor is unless the great Wheel or Spring which is to set the whole in motion is also well attended to & kept in good order.

  George Washington

  Spring, Order, Useless

  George Washington, John Clement Fitzpatrick, David Maydole Matteson, United States George Washington Bicentennial Commission (1779). “The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745-1799”, p.301

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• The fundamental fact in the lives of the poor in most parts of America is that the wages of common labor are far below the benefits of AFDC, Medicaid, food stamps, public housing, public defenders, leisure time and all the other goods and services of the welfare state.

  George Gilder

  America, Benefits, Leisure

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• The error in positivism is that it takes as its standard of truth the contingently given division of labor, that between the science and social praxis as well as that within science itself, and allows no theory that could reveal the division of labor to be itself derivative and mediated and thus strip it of its false authority.

  Theodor Adorno

  Division Of Labor, Errors, Derivatives

  Theodor W. Adorno (2012). “Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords”, p.10, Columbia University Press

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• The Government cannot afford to have a country made up entirely of rich people, because rich people pay so little tax that the Government would quickly go bankrupt. This is why Government men always tell us that labor is man's noblest calling. Government needs labor to pay its upkeep.

  Russell Baker

  Country, Men, People

  Russell Baker (1983). “So This Is Depravity”, Pocket Books

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• The history of society is the history of the inventive labors that man alter man, alter his desires, habits, outlook, relationships both to other men and to physical nature, with which man is in perpetual physical and technological metabolism.

  Isaiah Berlin

  Men, Desire, Habit

  Isaiah Berlin (1978). “Karl Marx: His Life and Environment”, p.93, Oxford University Press

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• The essence of a software entity is a construct of interlocking concepts. I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation.

  Fred Brooks

  Believe, Essence, Design

  "No Silver Bullet – Essence and Accident in Software Engineering". Paper by Fred Brooks, 1986.

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• It is labor alone that is productive: it creates wealth and therewith lays the outward foundations for the inward flowering of man.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Men, Foundation, Inward

  Ludwig von Mises (2016). “Liberalism: The Classical Tradition: The Economist”, p.10, VM eBooks

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• When we consider that labor is the producer of all wealth, is it not evident that the impoverishment and, dependence of labor are abnormal conditions resulting from restrictions and usurpations, and that instead of accepting protection, what labor should demand is freedom. That those who advocate any extension of freedom choose to go no further than suits their own special purpose is no reason why freedom itself should be distrusted.

  Henry George

  Special, Purpose, Abnormal

  Henry George (2006). “Protection Or Free Trade”, p.22, Cosimo, Inc.

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• So long as we have held fast to voluntary principles and have been actuated and inspired by the spirit of service, we have sustained our forward progress, and we have made our labor movement something to be respected and accorded a place in the councils of the Republic. Where we have blundered into trying to force a policy or decision, even though wise and right, we have impeded if not interrupted the realization of our own aims.

  Samuel Gompers

  Wise, Long, Decision

  Samuel Gompers, John McBride, William Green (1948). “The American Federationist”

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• [The labor movement is] a movement of the working people, for the working people, by the working people, governed by ourselves, with its policies determined by ourselves.

  Samuel Gompers

  People, Movement, Determined

  Proceedings of the Convention, Washington, D.C.: American Federation of Labor (p. 37), 1923.

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• The societal division of labor obtains the dignity of an ontological condition.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Division Of Labor, Dignity, Conditions

  Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.133, Routledge

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