Laborers Quotes - Page 3

• Ah little recks the laborer,
  How near his work is holding him to God,
  The loving Laborer through space and time

  Walt Whitman

  Space, Littles, Time And Space

  Walt Whitman (2013). “Leaves of Grass”, p.315, Simon and Schuster

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• Coal lay in ledges under the ground since the Flood, until a laborer with pick and windlass brings it to the surface. We may well call it black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Power, Civilization, Black

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1872). “Representative men. English traits. Conduct of life”, p.362

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• Whatever capital you divert to the support of a shiftless and good-for-nothing person is so much diverted from some other employment, and that means from somebody else. I would spend any conceivable amount of zeal and eloquence if I possessed it to try to make people grasp this idea. Capital is force. If it goes one way it cannot go another. If you give a loaf to a pauper you cannot give the same loaf to a laborer. Now this other man who would have got it but for the charitable sentiment which bestowed it on a worthless member of society is the Forgotten Man.

  William Graham Sumner

  Mean, Men, Ideas

  William Graham Sumner (1971). “Sumner today: selected essays of William Graham Sumner, with comments by American leaders”

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• A laborer might last ten years or so before expiring. But individual workers in the death camp of sugar were survived by their culture, which was constantly re-Africanized by fresh arrivals. To that plantation culture, the music of our hemisphere owes no small debt.

  Ned Sublette

  Years, Lasts, Culture

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• Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the State.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Sake, Add

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2010). “The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843-1871”, p.21, University of Georgia Press

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• It has passed over mountain ranges and
  The waters of the seven seas.
  It has shown upon laborers in the fields,
  Into the windows of homes,
  And shops, and factories.
  
  It has beheld cities with gleaming towers,
  And also the hovels of the poor.
  It has been witness to both good and evil,
  The works of honest men and women and
  The conspiracy of knaves.
  
  It has seen marching armies, bomb-blasted villages
  And "the destruction that wasteth at noonday."
  Now, unsullied from its tireless journey,
  It comes to us,
  Messenger of the morning.
  Harbinger of a new day.

  Clinton Lee Scott

  Morning, Home, Army

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• In the South of long ago whenever a new man appeared for work in any of the laborers gangs, he would be asked if he could sing. If he could he got the job. The singing of these working men set the rhythm for the work.

  William Christopher Handy

  Jobs, Men, Long Ago

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• 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.

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• The real work of men was hunting meat. The invention of agriculture was a giant step in the wrong direction, leading to serfdom, cities, and empire. From a race of hunters, artists, warriors, and tamers of horses, we degraded ourselves to what we are now: clerks, functionaries, laborers, entertainers, processors of information.

  Edward Abbey

  Horse, Real, Warrior

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• I'm not the creative one. I know that. If Rory Storm hadn't come along... and then The Beatles... I would have continued running around in teddyboy gangs. Today, well... I'd probably be a laborer. I'm glad I'm not, of course. It'll be nice to be part of history... some sort of history anyway. What I'd like to be is in school history books and be read by kids.

  Ringo Starr

  Running, Nice, Book

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• 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

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• Most people no longer believe that buying sneakers made in Asian sweatshops is a kindness to those child laborers. Farming is similar. In every country on earth, the most human scenario for farmers is likely to be feeding those who live nearby-if international markets would allow them to do it. Food transport has become a bizarre and profitable economic equation that's no longer really about feeding anyone ... If you care about farmers, let the potatoes stay home.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Country, Children, Kindness

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• I am a true laborer: I earn that I eat, get that I wear, owe no man hate, envy no man's happiness, glad of other men's good, content with my harm.

  William Shakespeare

  Happiness, Hate, Men

  'As You Like It' (1599) act 3, sc. 2, l. [78]

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• In America, no other distinction between man and man had ever been known but that of persons in office exercising powers by authority of the laws, and private individuals. Among these last, the poorest laborer stood on equal ground with the wealthiest millionaire, and generally on a more favored one whenever their rights seem to jar.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Exercise, Men, Rights

  Thomas Jefferson (2004). “Light and Liberty: Reflections on the Pursuit of Happiness”, p.40, Modern Library

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• 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”

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• 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

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• 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

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• If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Inspirational, Wages, Pay

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “Citizen Thoreau: Walden, Civil Disobedience, Life Without Principle, Slavery in Massachusetts, A Plea for Captain John Brown”, p.216, Graphic Arts Books

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• It is certain that the greatest poets, orators, statesmen, and historians, men of the most brilliant and imposing talents, have labored as hard, if not harder, than day laborers; and that the most obvious reason why they have been superior to other men is that they have taken more pains than other men.

  Orison Swett Marden

  Pain, Taken, Men

  Orison Swett Marden (1907). “The Optimistic Life”

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• The harvest here is indeed great, and the laborers are few and imperfectly fitted, without much grace, for such a work. And yet grace can make a few feeble instruments the means of accomplishing great things - things greater even than we can conceive.

  Hudson Taylor

  Mean, Grace, Missionary

  J. Hudson Taylor (2015). “A Retrospect: The Story Behind My Zeal for Missions”, p.46, Aneko Press

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• The truth beyond the fetish's glimmering mirage is the relationship of laborer to product; it is the social account of how that object came to be. In this view every commodity, beneath the mantle of its pricetag, is a hieroglyph ripe for deciphering, a riddle whose solution lies in the story of the worker who made it and the conditions under which it was made.

  Leah Hager Cohen

  Lying, Views, Stories

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• 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

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• 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

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• The only things that were available to me were either be a laborer or be a drug dealer. So I became an armed robber. It was a lot simpler.

  Danny Trejo

  Drug, Dealer, Robbers

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• 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”

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