Laborers Quotes - Page 2

• Order is a necessary condition for making a structure function. A physical mechanism, be it a team of laborers, the body of an animal, or a machine, can work only if it is in physical order.

  Rudolf Arnheim

  Team, Animal, Order

  Rudolf Arnheim (1974). “Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order”, p.3, Univ of California Press

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.

  Marguerite Duras

  Passionate, Literature, Journalism

  "Practicalities (Walesa's Wife)". Book by Marguerite Duras, 1990.

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• A few men own from ten thousand to two hundred thousand acres each. The poor Laborer can find no resting place, save on the barren mountain, or in the trackless desert.

  Denis Kearney

  Men, Two, Hiking

  8 Copy quote

• What made me want to go into doing comics was I was working as a laborer with my father, a gardener.

  Dan DeCarlo

  Father, Want, Made

  7 Copy quote

• Men don't and can't live by exchanging articles, but by producing them. They don't live by trade, but by work. Give up that foolish and vain title of Trades Unions; and take that of laborers Unions.

  John Ruskin

  Giving Up, Men, Titles

  1880 Open letter to EnglishTrades Unions, 29 Sep.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Upon the sacredness of property civilization itself depends-the right of the laborer to his hundred dollars in the savings bank, and equally the legal right of the millionaire to his millions.

  Andrew Carnegie

  Civilization, Dollars, Saving

  Andrew Carnegie, Benjamin Franklin (2015). “The ABC of Money: Including The Way to Wealth and The Gospel of Wealth”, p.51, Cosimo Classics

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• And I am glad to know that there is a system of labor - where the laborer can strike if he wants to! I would to God that such a system prevailed all over the world.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Hard Work, World, Want

  Speech, Hartford, Conn., 5 Mar. 1860

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The creator of the heavens obeys a carpenter; the God of eternal glory listens to a poor virgin. Has anyone ever witnessed anything comparable to this? Let the philosopher no longer disdain from listening to the common laborer; the wise, to the simple; the educated, to the illiterate; a child of a prince, to a peasant.

  Anthony of Padua

  Wise, Children, Simple

  253 Copy quote

• The U.S. Army cancelled an order for 600,000 black berets that were made in China. It's not just that they were made by slave laborers. It's that no soldier can feel good about himself wearing headgear from the Kathie Lee Collection.

  Argus Hamilton

  Army, Order, Feel Good

  4 Copy quote

• A foul-mouthed oaf, a drunken laborer lying in a drain, a beaten wife with blackened eyes and torn clothes, cannot be made romantic to a child who sees how other children suffer from bad-tempered parents, from drunken fathers to termagant mothers.

  Joyce Cary

  Mother, Children, Father

  Joyce Cary (1953). “Except the Lord: A Novel”, New York : Harper

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• The wind, a sightless laborer, whistles at his task.

  William Wordsworth

  Wind, Tasks

  4 Copy quote

• So many sins against the poor cry out to high heaven! One of the most deadly sins is to deprive the laborer of his hire. There is another: to instill in him paltry desires so compulsive that he is willing to sell his liberty and his honor to satisfy them. We are all guilty of concupiscence, but newspapers, radios, television, and battalions of advertising men (woe to that generation!) deliberately stimulate our desires, the satisfaction of which so often means the degradation of the family.

  Dorothy Day

  Mean, Men, Heaven

  6 Copy quote

• Eye-popping tales of growing income inequality are hardly new. By now, nearly every American must be painfully aware of the widening pay gap between top executives and shop floor laborers; between 'Master of the Universe' financiers and pretty much everyone else.

  Steven Rattner

  Eye, Pay Gap, Growing

  4 Copy quote

• You can, in short, lead the life of the mind, which is, despite some appalling frustrations, the happiest life on earth. And one day, in the thick of this, approaching some partial vision, you will (I swear) find yourself on the receiving end of - of all things - an "idea for a story," and you will, God save you, start thinking about writing some fiction of your own. Then you will understand, in what I fancy might be a blinding flash, that all this passionate thinking is what fiction is about, that all those other fiction writers started as you did, and are laborers in the same vineyard.

  Annie Dillard

  Writing, Frustration, Thinking

  4 Copy quote

• Every man is equally entitled to protection by law. But when the laws undertake to add... artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges—to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful— the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers, who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their government.

  Andrew Jackson

  Powerful, Mean, Humble

  Veto Message on Bank Bill, 10 July 1832

  123 Copy quote

  Show source

• Cool is spent. Cool is empty. Cool is ex post facto. When advertisers and pundits hoard a word, you know it's time to retire from it. To move on. I want to suggest, therefore, that we begin to avoid cool now. Cool is a trick to get you to buy garments made by sweatshop laborers in Third World countries. Cool is the Triumph of the Will. Cool enables you to step over bodies. Cool enables you to look the other way. Cool makes you functional, eager for routine distraction, passive, doped, stupid.

  Rick Moody

  Country, Stupid, Moving

  46 Copy quote

• All the great establishments, of every kind, now in the hands of a few proprietors, but employing a great number of wage laborers, would be broken up; for few or no persons, who could hire capital and do business for themselves would consent to labour for wages for another.

  Lysander Spooner

  Hands, Numbers, Broken

  Lysander Spooner (1886). “A Letter to Grover Cleveland on His False Inaugural Address, the Usurpation and Crimes of Lawmakers and Judges, and Consequent Poverty, Ignorance, and Servitude of the People”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• If you are a Jewish Israeli, you go to Gaza, you get the villa of your life, the villa which you did not dream of ever getting in Israel, a beautiful two-story villa with green meadows and so on, practically for nothing. Then you put up hothouses of tomatoes or flowers; you take the very Arabs from whom you grabbed this land and employ them as laborers in your hothouses. Israeli law does not apply in Gaza: There is no minimum wage, no annual vacation, no compensation for dismissal - so you get the work very, very cheap. It is a wonderful setup economically.

  Uri Avnery

  Beautiful, Dream, Flower

  Source: progressive.org

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The "health, education, and welfare" section of government is another boondoggle. First we manufacture indigent and superfluous people by legal monopolies in land, money and idea patents, erecting tariff barriers to protect monopolies from foreign competition, and taxing laborers to subsidize rich farmers and privileged manufacturers. Then we create "social workers, " etc., to care for them and thereby establish a self-aggravating and permanent institutionalized phenomenon.

  Laurance Labadie

  Government, Self, Health Education

  Laurance Labadie (1978). “Selected Essays”

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Either the Anglo-Saxon race will possess the Pacific slope or the Mongolians will possess it. We have this day to choose... whether legislation shall be in the interest of the American free laborer or for the servile laborer from China... You cannot work a man who must have beef and bread, and would prefer beer, alongside a man who can live on rice.

  James G. Blaine

  Beer, Men, Race

  16 Copy quote

• It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in earlier times was enjoyed by the aristocracy. When one recalls how aristocracies in the past actually behaved, the prospect is not cheerful.

  W. H. Auden

  Past, Cheerful, Majority

  8 Copy quote

• This root [the potato], no matter how much you prepare it, is tasteless and floury. It cannot pass for an agreeable food, but it supplies a food sufficiently abundant and sufficiently healthy for men who ask only to sustain themselves. The potato is criticized with reason for being windy, but what matters windiness for the vigorous organisms of peasants and laborers?

  Denis Diderot

  Men, Vegetables, Roots

  4 Copy quote

• He who by an exertion of mind or body, adds to the aggregate of enjoyable wealth, increases the sum of human knowledge, or gives to human life higher elevation or greater fullness - he is, in the larger meaning of the words, a " producer," a " working man," a " laborer," and is honestly earning honest wages.

  Henry George

  Honesty, Men, Giving

  Henry George (2006). “Protection Or Free Trade”, p.68, Cosimo, Inc.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Actual philosophers... are commanders and law-givers: they say "thus it shall be!", it is they who determine the Wherefore and Whither of mankind, and they possess for this task the preliminary work of all the philosophical laborers, of all those who have subdued the past - they reach for the future with creative hand, and everything that is or has been becomes for them a means, an instrument, a hammer.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Philosophical, Mean, Past

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1973). “Beyond good and evil: prelude to a philosophy of the future”, Penguin Classics

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle, hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or laborer's cottage, is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.

  George Orwell

  Jobs, Wall, Home

  George Orwell, Ian Angus, Sheila Davison (1998). “The Complete Works of George Orwell: A patriot after all, 1940-1941”

  49 Copy quote

  Show source