Workers Quotes - Page 11

• It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.

  Philip Levine

  Ironic, Detroit, Facts

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• Mind is the great lever of all things; human thought is the process by which human ends are ultimately answered; and the diffusion of knowledge, so astonishing in the last half-century, has rendered innumerable minds, variously gifted by nature, competent to be competitors or fellow-workers on the theatre of intellectual operation.

  Daniel Webster

  Mind, Intellectual, Theatre

  Daniel Webster, Edwin Percy Whipple (2001). “The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster”, p.131, Beard Books

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• Because of their historical theory of the "alienation of labor" (that the worker must become less and less in control of the work of his hands) the Marxist parties never fought for the man-worthy job itself.

  Paul Goodman

  Jobs, Party, Men

  Paul Goodman (2011). “Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society”, p.42, New York Review of Books

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• Let me go out on a limb and suggest that those who see hints of a new class ideology developing around information technology are not necessarily wild-eyed. "Bit-twiddlers" are neither exactly proletariat nor bourgeoisie. They may not own the means of production in the sense that Marx argued, but they certainly do have significantly control over those means, in a more profound way than the term "symbols analysts" or "knowledge workers" captures. As a rough generalization, they value science and technological problem-solving elegance equally at least with profit.

  Steven Weber

  Mean, Technology, Class

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• The leather vests are work vests, supposed to look like factory workers. They're actually the vests we use in the studio when we make jewelry.

  Pamela Love

  Looks, Use, Vests

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Fast food workers are all the governor has power to enact. Your state legislature is held hostage by the same nitwits that hold hostage the federal [government]. People who have confused suffocating collectivism, which is bad, for a necessity to solve collective action problems, which is what all human endeavor is based on.

  Nick Hanauer

  Confused, Government, People

  "'Shit's Gonna Hit the Fan': Talking to a Billionaire About Class War". Interview with Hamilton Nolan, gawker.com. June 16, 2015.

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• While I have historically been a late worker, you know, sometimes I even like to get up early and see what's happened in the few hours of the night and then I often take a nap in the middle of the day just to sort of make up for stretching my day out.

  Larry Wall

  Night, Naps, Up Early

  "How to Code Like Larry Wall". Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

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• But though the professed aim of all scientific work is to unravel the secrets of nature, it has another effect, not less valuable, on the mind of the worker. It leaves him in possession of methods which nothing but scientific work could have led him to invent.

  James Clerk Maxwell

  Secret, Mind, Method

  James Clerk Maxwell, W. D. Niven (2003). “The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell”, p.372, Courier Corporation

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• These are the now-endangered markers of a civilized society: legally ordained minimum wages, child labor laws, workers safety and compensation laws, pure foods and safe drugs, Social Security, Medicare and rules that promote competitive markets over monopolies and cartels.

  Bill Moyers

  Children, Law, Safety

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• Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them.

  Fred Brooks

  Communication, Men, Tasks

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• I worked on human rights projects in Haiti, Cameroon, and East Asia, and the bigger ones tended to do with agriculture. My role was to make sure that there was equity that remained at the base of those projects, with the workers. I had a couple of different lives.

  Sanjay Rawal

  Couple, Rights, Agriculture

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• The greatest scandal of the century in American psychiatry ... is the growing mania among thousands of inept therapists, family counselors, and social workers for arousing false memories of childhoood sexual abuse.

  Martin Gardner

  Memories, Abuse, Growing

  Martin Gardner (1996). “Weird Water & Fuzzy Logic: More Notes of a Fringe Watcher”

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• I thought that, given the system of rewards central to our economic system, in which profit maximization is valued above all else and specifically above life, it is probably just as irresistible to the owners of capital (human or otherwise) to exploit workers (and the land): "Nothing personal," they say as they load their property onto the ship bound for the Middle Passage, "but a man's gotta turn a dime."

  Derrick Jensen

  Men, Land, Dimes

  Derrick Jensen (2002). “The Culture of Make Believe”, p.102, Chelsea Green Publishing

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• The workers of America have power enough to topple the structure of capitalism at home and to lift the whole world with them when they rise.

  James P. Cannon

  Home, America, World

  "The Struggle for a Proletarian Party". Book by James P. Cannon, 1943.

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• Ability for stupendous toil is lodged in every human spirit, a grand gift from the God of nature; but only the persevering worker knows what this latent power is able to achieve.

  Elias Lyman Magoon

  Toil, Able, Spirit

  Elias Lyman Magoon (1849). “Proverbs for the people: or, Illustrations of practical godliness drawn from the Book of wisdom”, p.182

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• When we use the term pig, for example, we are referring to the people who systematically violate the peoples' constitutional rights - whether they be monopoly capitalists or police. The term is now being adopted by radicals, hippies, and minority peoples. Even the workers, when the pigs supported strike-breakers like they did as Union Oil where 100 local police came in a cracked strikers' heads, began to call them by their true name.

  Bobby Seale

  Hippie, Rights, Pigs

  The Guardian Interview, February 1970.

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• Factory workers are not working for capitalism, they are working for a living wage.

  Bernard Crick

  Factory Workers, Factories, Working For A Living

  Bernard Crick (1993). “In Defense of Politics”, p.240, University of Chicago Press

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• The paradox of innovation is this: CEO's often complain about lack of innovation, while workers often say leaders are hostile to new ideas.

  Patrick Dixon

  Ideas, Leader, Innovation

  "Building a Better Business". Book by Patrick Dixon, 2005.

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• Employers crave the power to fire workers whose performance is judged inferior-not just to get rid of those particular workers, but more importantly to motivate and discipline the rest of the workforce.

  Jim Stanford

  Fire, Discipline, Employers

  Jim Stanford (2008). “Economics for everyone: a short guide to the economics of capitalism”, Pluto Pr

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• This relationship is the foundation for the argument, made by some trade unionists and labour advocates, that high wages can actually be "good for business". The precedent set by Henry Ford in 1914, who offered workers $5.00 per day (a very high wage at the time) so they could afford to buy the same cars they made, is often invoked.

  Jim Stanford

  Car, Foundation, Wages

  "Economics For Everyone". Book by Jim Stanford, 2008.

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• Henry Ford, in a sense, was the first Keynesian. He paid his assembly workers high wages so they could afford to buy his cars.

  Robert Kuttner

  Car, Wages, Firsts

  Robert Kuttner (1987). “The Economic Illusion: False Choices Between Prosperity and Social Justice”, p.169, University of Pennsylvania Press

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• By the standards of honest, if unorthodox, accounting, government workers don't pay taxes, but are paid out of taxes. In other words, they pay taxes out of money confiscated from taxpayers, who, in turn, pay taxes twice: on their own income and on the income of members of the bureaucracy. At the very least, this should disqualify state workers from voting.

  Ilana Mercer

  Government, Voting, Unorthodox

  "Life in the Oink Sector". www.wnd.com. September 25, 2009.

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• Capitalists control the machineries. They create difficulties to the workers. Consequently rationalism, which has to lead the way for peaceful life to all, has resulted in causing poverty and worries to the people because of dominating forces.

  Periyar E. V. Ramasamy

  People, Worry, Peaceful

  Collected works of Periyar E.V.R., p. 511, 2005.

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• Unlike most great talkers, the rooks are good workers, too.

  Flora Thompson

  Good Work, Talkers

  Flora Thompson (1979). “A Country Calendar, and Other Writings”, Oxford University Press, USA

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• The social and economic impact of innovative American researchers, companies, and workers over the course of U.S. history have been enormous.

  Robert Hormats

  Impact, Economic, Social

  "The Road to an Effective Innovation Diplomacy" by Robert Hormats, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 20, 2013.

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