Labor Quotes

What the country needs are a few labor-making inventions. ~ Arnold H. Glasow

You are a free man, and let no organization come between you and your best interests. Do not let any man, or any body of men, tell you where you shall work, or where you shall not work, when you shall work, or when, you shall not work. If a man wants to belong to a labor organization, let him belong. If he does not want to belong to a labor organization, let him have perfect liberty to stay out. You own yourself. Let no man put a manacle on your hand, or foot, or head, or heart. ~ Thomas De Witt Talmage

Recall Marx's fundamental insight about the "bourgeois" limitation of the logic of equality: capitalist inequalities ("exploitation") are not the "unprincipled violations of the principle of equality," but are absolutely inherent to the logic of equality, they are the paradoxical result of its consistent realization. What we have in mind here is not only the wearisome old motif of how market exchange presupposes formally/legally equal subjects who meet and interact in the market; the crucial moment of Marx's critique of "bourgeois" socialists is that capitalist exploitation does not involve any kind of "unequal" exchange between the worker and the capitalist - this exchange is fully equal and "just," ideally (in principle), the worker gets paid the full value of the commodity he is selling (his labor-power). Of course, radical bourgeois revolutionaries are aware of this limitation; however, the way they try to counteract it is through a direct "terroristic imposition of more and more de facto equality (equal salaries, equal access to health services…), which can only be imposed through new forms of formal inequality (different sorts of preferential treatments for the underprivileged). In short, the axiom of equality" means either not enough (it remains the abstract form of actual inequality) or too much (enforce "terroristic" equality) - it is a formalistic notion in a strict dialectical sense, that is, its limitation is precisely that its form is not concrete enough, but a ~ Slavoj Zizek

Peace and happiness are what you covet, but these are only to be obtained by labor. ~ Thomas A Kempis

Teaching children the joy of honest labor is one of the greatest of all gifts you can bestow upon them. Let us also teach our children to see that the work assigned is carried to its completion and to take pride in what they accomplish. ~ L. Tom Perry

My task, as a member of this parliament and a 30-year member of the Australian Labor Party, as its former leader, as its former foreign minister and its former prime minister, is to now throw my every effort in securing Julia Gillard's re-election as Labor prime minister at the next election. ~ Kevin Rudd

Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to! ~ Susan Sontag

Facilis descensus Averno:
Noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
Sed revocare gradium superasque evadere ad auras,
Hoc opus, hic labor est.
(The gates of Hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this task and mighty labor lies.) ~ Virgil

Transcending class distinctions, the speaker [Stalin] portrays the relation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as a mere division of labor. The workers and soldiers achieve the revolution, Guchkov and Miliukov "fortify" it.[ ... ] This superintendent's approach to the historical process is exactly characteristic of the leaders of Menshevism, this handing out of instructions to various classes and then patronizingly criticizing their fulfillment. ~ Leon Trotsky

Government machinery has been described as a marvelous labor saving device which enables ten men to do the work of one. ~ John Maynard Keynes

That's what building a body of work is all about. It's about the daily labor, the many individual acts, the choices large and small that add up over time, over a lifetime to a lasting legacy. It's about not being satisfied with the latest achievement, the latest gold star, because the one thing I know about a body of work is that it's never finished. It's cumulative. It deepens and expands with each day you give your best. You may have setbacks and you may have failures, but you're not done. ~ Barack Obama

Ah, many a one has started forth with hope and purpose high; Has fought throughout a weary life, and passed all pleasure by; Has burst all flowery chains by which men aye have been enthralled; Has been stone-deaf to voices sweet, that softly, sadly called; Has scorned the flashing goblet with the bubbles on its brim; Has turned his back on jewelled hands that madly beckoned him; Has, in a word, condemned himself to follow out his plan By stern and lonely labor
and has died, a conquered man! ~ George Arnold

Before this grief, mountains must bend down
And rivers stop,
But prison locks are strong,
And behind them are the labor-camp bunks
And the deadly tedium.
For others the fresh breeze is blowing,
For others the extravagant sun sets -
For us everything is the same, we know nothing,
We hear only the keys and their hateful grinding.
Only the soldiers' stiff steps.
We get up as for early Mass in the city,
The savaged city, and coming
We meet ourselves, the dead, the unbreathing.
The sun is low, the Neva misty,
It is only in the distance that hope is singing.
The sentence . . . and at once tears,
Now everything has been taken,
The rest of life, torn from her heart,
Knocked backwards by a hoodlum
And yet she walks . . . stumbles . . . alone . . .
Where are they now, unwilling friends
Of years in Hell?
What visions do they see in Siberian snow-storms?
What hallucinations in the circle of the moon?
I send them this goodbye and wish them well. ~ Anna Akhmatova

If technology and communications can adapt to people's modern lifestyles, then why can't our labor laws follow suit? Private-sector businesses continue to live under an outdated federal mandate that says the only way to compensate for overtime is through cash wages. ~ Renee Ellmers

Labor is the great source from which nearly all, if not all, human comforts and necessities are drawn. ~ Abraham Lincoln

People are so addicted to convenience that they have become trapped in a vicious circle: The more labor-saving appliances they acquire, the harder they need to work; the harder they
work, the more labor-saving appliances they feel they need to acquire. ~ Bill Bryson

Like Nemesis of Greek tragedy, the central problem of America after the Civil War, as before, was the black man: those four million souls whom the nation had used and degraded, and on whom the South had built an oligarchy similar to the colonial imperialism of today, erected on cheap colored labor and raising raw material for manufacture. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

All my life I had thought that if you worked hard you would be rewarded. If you worked your ass off, there would be some reward for you. But now I knew that the reward was just the chance to work your ass off. ~ Don J. Snyder

The things required for prosperous labor, prosperous manufactures, and prosperous commerce are three. First, liberty; second, liberty; third, liberty. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

For many Westerners, "it's natural" seems to mean "it's good." This view is wrong and comes from shopping in supermarkets and living in landscaped environments. Plants evolved toxins to deter animals, fungi, and bacteria from eating them. The list of "natural" foods that need processing to detoxify them goes on and on. Early potatoes were toxic, and the Andean peoples ate clay to neutralize the toxin. Even beans can be toxic without processing. In California, many hunter-gatherer populations relied on acorns, which, similar to manioc, require a labor intensive, multiday leaching process. Many small-scale societies have similarly exploited hardy, tropical plants called cycads for food. But cycads contain a nerve toxin. If not properly processed, they can cause neurological symptoms, paralysis, and death. Numerous societies, including hunter-gatherers, have culturally evolved an immense range of detoxification techniques for cycads. By contrast with our species, other animals have far superior abilities to detoxify plants. Humans, however, lost these genetic adaptations and evolved a dependence on cultural know-how, just to eat. ~ Joseph Henrich

In April the true labor began. He rose before dawn and was at work in the trees as the sun rose. On a ladder, with his shears, maneuvering into the farthest reaches of the understories. At times whistling, at times muttering to himself. But mostly silent. Always working in that calm, deliberate way that made it impossible to imagine that he would ever complete the row, not to mention the entire orchard, in time. How could he afford to be so careful? It's that it was just possible, but barely. The design, the organization he achieved in the rows, in each tree, pleased him like nothing else. It was his passion, his whole life. ~ Amanda Coplin

What if there were no longer only two sides? Not just capital versus labor, but a third team, one that straddled elements of both? I think there's a huge opportunity for a third kind of participant, a linchpin, and now there is an opportunity to change all the rules that we've lived with all our lives. There is a shortage of this third kind of worker, and that shortage means that the market needs you desperately. The con game is ending, at least for people passionate enough to do something about it. ~ Seth Godin

The dancing vortex of a sacred metaphor clashes horns and halos to make wounded music set to the tempo of a new era in brilliant labor. ~ Aberjhani

You need to be strong to survive the labor and to make us greater. We fatten hogs, not because it pleases us but because we need hogs to survive. But we can't have you too clever. We can't have you so fit you outrun us." She ~ Colson Whitehead

Everybody feels better about himself, his community, and his country if employers are paying workers well. Economics, though, teaches that if every employer is pressured to raise wages, some labor will be priced out of the market. ~ Edmund Phelps

Take one famous example: arguments about property destruction after Seattle. Most of these, I think, were really arguments about capitalism. Those who decried window-breaking did so mainly because they wished to appeal to middle-class consumers to move towards global exchange-style green consumerism, and to ally with labor bureaucracies and social democrats abroad. This was not a path designed to provoke a direct confrontation with capitalism, and most of those who urged us to take this route were at least skeptical about the possibility that capitalism could ever really be defeated. Many were in fact in favor of capitalism, if in a significantly humanized form. Those who did break windows, on the other hand, didn't care if they offended suburban homeowners, because they did not figure that suburban homeowners were likely to ever become a significant element in any future revolutionary anticapitalist coalition. They were trying, in effect, to hijack the media to send a message that the system was vulnerable -- hoping to inspire similar insurrectionary acts on the part of those who might be considering entering a genuinely revolutionary alliance; alienated teenagers, oppressed people of color, undocumented workers, rank-and-file laborers impatient with union bureaucrats, the homeless, the unemployed, the criminalized, the radically discontent. If a militant anticapitalist movement was to begin, in America, it would have to start with people like these: people who don't need to ~ David Graeber

The poor despise labor when performed by slaves. ~ George Mason

True Americanism recognizes the enormous gravity of the social and labor problems which confront us. ~ Henry Cabot Lodge

There's the fact that animation is extremely time-consuming, tedious, labor-intensive, and therefore, extremely expensive as an art form to really do it right, to really do full animation. ~ Eric Drooker

Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals. ~ Albert Einstein

A low standard of prayer means a low standard of character and a low standard of service. Those alone labor effectively among men who impetuously fling themselves upward towards God. ~ Charles Brent

Spare neither labor in the study, prayer in the closet, nor zeal in the pulpit. If men do not judge their souls to be worth a thought, compel them to see that their minister is of a vex], different opinion. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

They have been taught to labor," the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1891. "They have been taught Christian civilization, and to speak the noble English language instead of some African gibberish. The account is square with the ex-slaves. ~ Anonymous

It is such hard work to keep your heart hidden! And worse, by the time you find it easy, it will be harder still to show it. It is a terrible magic in this world to ask for exactly the thing you want. Not least because to know exactly the thing you want and look it in the eye is a long, long labor. ~ Catherynne M Valente

Today, in the May Day, find a worker and shake his hand with gratitude! Without workers, no civilisation could be built! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Some people call it child labor. I call it ... let's not get technical. ~ Sarah Ockler

Ah, my dear friend, cheer up... After all, we have peace! And because there is peace, the occupiers can't behave so abominably anymore. All right, we're not free. But we are used to that, Mr. Kujawski. After all we were both born into slavery, and we will die in it. Oh yes, at first they'll exploit us ruthlessly. Fourteen hours of slave labor a day. A bowl of watery soup. Whippings, beatings... But that will pass with time. Because there is peace, they won't have a chance to get any new slaves. They'll have to take good care of those have already. Cheer up, dear Mr. Kujawski... [...] Arbeit macht frei, work makes man free, and it makes him especially so in the sunshine of European peace. We will lack only one thing. Only one! The right of dissent. The right to say out loud that we want a free and independent Poland, that we want to brush our teeth and go on holiday in our own way, conceive children and work our own way, think in our own way, live and die. This is the one thing you will find missing in the sunshine of European peace, which you, my friend, hold to be the highest good. ~ Andrzej Szczypiorski

Seek to know God in your closets, call upon him in the fields. Follow the directions of the Book of Mormon, and pray over, and for your families, your cattle, your flocks, your herds, your corn, and all things that you possess [see Alma 34:18-27]; ask the blessing of God upon all your labors, and everything that you engage in. ~ Joseph Smith Jr.

Most people can swim a narrow river. Water is an alien element, but with labor we can force ourselves through it. A good swimmer can cross a wide river, a lake, even the English Channel; no one, as far as we know, has ever swum the Atlantic Ocean, or is likely to do so. Even a champion swimmer, if he had business which required to spend alternate weeks in Paris and London, would not make the trip regularly by swimming the English Channel. Although we can force ourselves through water by skill and main strength, for all practical purposes our ability to traverse water is only as good as our ships or our airplanes. And so with the activities of our brains. Thinking is probably as foreign to human nature as is water; it is an unnatural element into which we throw ourselves with hesitation, and in which we flounder once we are there. We have learned, during the millenniums, to do rather well with thinking, but only if we buoy ourselves up with words. Some thinking of a simple sort we can do without words, but difficult and sustained thinking, presumably, is completely impossible without their aid, as traversing the Atlantic Ocean is presumably impossible without instruments or submarine transportation. ~ Charlton Grant Laird

For example, the citizens will live out the value of diligence in their enterprises. They will live out the value of prudence in their finances. They will live out the value of industry in the economy. They will live out the value of love in their neighbourhood. They will live out the value of dignity of labour in the market place, etc. All these will go a long way into propelling both the economy and political life of a nation to the greatest height possible. ~ Sunday Adelaja

Judge Carter sat in stony silence, completely unmoved. At the end of the trial, he pronounced King guilty of conspiracy to violate the 1921 law and ordered him to pay a five-hundred-dollar fine or serve a year at hard labor. Like Judge Carter, the national newspaper and magazine reporters waiting outside for the ruling ignored the black women's testimonies that detailed decades of mistreatment and denied King's leadership in the boycott. Instead, the media turned King into an apostle of civil rights. ~ Danielle L. McGuire

In the beginning, God ordained that man should labor, not as a curse, but as a blessing ~ American Federation Of Labor

When I was with the Labor Party, I'd get into trouble because the party bosses determined that some of what I wrote, or proposed to write about, wasn't conducive to their policies or to electoral success. ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The artist labors while he may, But finds at best too brief the day; And, tho' his works outlast the time And nation that they make sublime, He feels and sees that Nature knows Nothing of time in what she does, But has a leisure infinite Wherein to do her work aright. ~ Henry Abbey

We have to get a crew together to meet up after school today."
"Ouch," Finn said. "Well, you've come to the right place."
They looked out across the cafeteria, where hundreds of their peers sat and ate, just waiting to be tapped for after-school labor.
"I guess I should get started," Megan said.
"What about Doug?" Finn asked.
"It's just a gut instinct, but I don't think he's going to be much help," Megan replied, walking backward. "Wish me luck."
"Good luck," Finn said with a smile. ~ Kate Brian

Prosperity is always built on slave labor. Ask any Ameri-can't. Or Bulgari-can. Yes, we can, eat from a trash can... ~ Will Advise

Near the end of Love's Labor, Eva Feder Kittay (1999, 154) writes that a fundamental aspect of a just society is related to the conditions and limits of mothering. In a just society, women with disabilities can mother because there is adequate emotional and material support for them to do so, and given a context of support and approval to reproduce, they can also choose not to bear children. In a just society, mothers of children with disability can mother, and they, their children, and other needed caregivers will be adequately supported." (15) ~ Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson And Jen Cellio

You see Democrats who will demonize business. I don't do that. You see Republicans who demonize labor. I don't do that. ~ Tim Kaine

This is the greatest wealth we possess: to know how to direct our labors rightly. ~ Brigham Young

As more and more Americans own shares of stock, more and more Americans understand that taxing businesses is taxing them. Regulating businesses is taxing them. They ought to be thinking long-term about their ownership, not just their income, and that they should pay taxes on capital, as well as taxes on labor. ~ Grover Norquist

But maybe it's the laboring that gives you shape. Might the most fulfilling times be those spent solo at your tasks, literally immersed or not, when you are able to uncover the smallest surprises and unlikely details of some process or operation that in turn exposes your proclivities and prejudices both? ~ Chang-rae Lee

Four little chests all in a row,
Dim with dust, and worn by time,
Four women, taught by weal and woe
To love and labor in their prime. "
"Four sisters, parted for an hour,
None lost, one only gone before,
Made by love's immortal power,
Nearest and dearest evermore. ~ Louisa May Alcott

All of the progress that the US has made over the last couple of centuries has come from unemployment. It has come from figuring out how to produce more goods with fewer workers, thereby releasing labor to be more productive in other areas. It has never come about through permanent unemployment, but temporary unemployment, in the process of shifting people from one area to another. ~ Milton Friedman

In countries where income from labor is most equally distributed, such as the Scandinavian countries between 1970 and 1990, the top 10 percent of earners receive about 20 percent of total wages and the bottom 50 percent about 35 percent. ~ Thomas Piketty

There was never a revival of religion without a revival of his opposition. As soon as Ezra and Nehemiah begin to labor, Sanballat and Tobiah are stirred up to hinder them. What then? We are not alarmed because Satan hindereth us, for it is a proof that we are on the Lord's side, and are doing the Lord's work, and in his strength we shall win the victory, and triumph over our adversary. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

The first language humans had was gestures. There was nothing primitive about this language that flowed from people's hands, nothing we say now that could not be said in the endless array of movements possible with the fine bones of the fingers and wrists. The gestures were complex and subtle, involving a delicacy of motion that has since been lost completely.

During the Age of Silence, people communicated more, not less. Basic survival demanded that the hands were almost never still, and so it was only during sleep (and sometimes not even then) that people were not saying something or other. No distinction was made between the gestures of language and the gestures of life. The labor of building a house, say, or preparing a meal was no less an expression than making the sign for I love you or I feel serious. When a hand was used to shield one's face when frightened by a loud noise something was being said, and when fingers were used to pick up what someone else had dropped something was being said; and even when the hands were at rest, that, too, was saying something. Naturally, there were misunderstandings. There were times when a finger might have been lifted to scratch a nose, and if casual eye contact was made with one's lover just then, the lover might accidentally take it to be the gesture, not at all dissimilar, for Now I realize I was wrong to love you. These mistakes were heartbreaking. And yet, because people knew how easily they could happen, because th ~ Nicole Krauss

A quote has an even more powerful effect if we presume not just a particular author behind it, but God, nature, the unconscious, labor, or difference. These are strong fetishes, each conjuring the powerful submedial in a particular way. Yet all of them must nonetheless be exchanged in a certain rhythm according to the laws of the medial economy. In order to create such fetishes, one does not have to use brilliant quotes by famous authors but can use anonymous quotes that stem from the author- less realm of the everyday, lowly, foreign, vulgar, aggressive, or stupid. Precisely such quotes produce the effect of medial sincerity, that is, the revelation of a deeply submerged, hidden, medial plane on the familiar medial surface. It then appears as if this surface had been blasted open from the inside and that the respective quotes had sprung forth from the submedial interior - like aliens. All of this, of course, refers to the economy of the quote as a gift that can be offered, accepted, and reciprocated. ~ Boris Groys

Harmonies come really naturally to me. I don't have to labor too hard over them. I'll sing a lead vocal, and then I will immediately have all of these other ideas for vocal harmonies. I think that some of the most fun parts of recording, for me, are the vocal harmonies. ~ Juliana Hatfield

In a market economy, a main determinant of social standing is participation in the labor market and the associated willingness to 'self-commodify' (e.g., Esping-Andersen 1999), the latter term nicely emphasizing how market economies render all forms of worth, even self-worth, a function of market valuation. When individuals fail to self-commodify, they fall outside the most fundamental institutions of the society, thereby reducing them to nonentities and social ciphers. This is why a mere transfer of income to the underclass... is inconsequential in relieving feelings of social exclusion. If anything, such a transfer only draws attention to the initial failure to self-commodify. although a class map also embodies distinctions of social standing among those who have an enduring commitment to the labor market, the social divide between the underclass and all other classes looms especially large because it captures this fundamental insider-outsider distinction. ~ Ravi Kanbur

Every man among us is more fit to meet the duties and responsibilities of citizenship because of the perils over which, in the past, the nation has triumphed; because of the blood and sweat and tears, the labor and the anguish, through which, in the days that have gone, our forefathers moved on to triumph. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Writing is a labor of love and also an act of defiance, a way to light a candle in a gale wind. ~ Alice Childress

Today in America, unions have a secure place in our industrial life. Only a handful of reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions and depriving working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice. I have no use for those - regardless of their political party - who hold some vain and foolish dream of spinning the clock back to days when organized labor was huddled, almost as a hapless mass. Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

A thousand wheels of labor are turned by dear affections, and kept in motion by self-sacrificing endurance; and the crowds that pour forth in the morning and return at night are daily procession of love and duty. ~ Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Without a sharp turnaround toward democracy and equality in the United States, Europe will be virtually alone in its commitment to social democracy. The pressures of low-wage immigrant labor, cheap imports from Eastern Europe and Asia, and free-market practices of governments are already threatening once secure areas of employment and causing right-wing populism to pop up in various Western European countries. Surprising numbers of middle-class and working-class voters have supported ultranationalist, neofascist parties throughout Europe because, like white male workers in the United States, they see their status slipping. ~ Steve Brouwer

There seems a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labor of the novelist, and of slighting performances which have only genius, wit and taste to recommend them. ~ Jane Austen

So I don't see the theme of the story as nature versus science. I see it as a conflict between demanding and understanding, between the kinds of labor that our society values or doesn't value, "innovators" versus "maintainers." It's ~ Nalo Hopkinson

The documentary we are working on is about my mother, Bev Umehara, for whom our film company, Bev's Girl Films, is named after. It is a passion project that I have wanted to make since her unexpected passing in 1999. The film is about my mother's calling which came late in life, at 47, when she made the sudden transformation from a humble hardworking secretary and mother of four, into a labor activist, a respected union leader, and a role model for rank-and-file workers, women of color, and for all Asian Pacific Americans. ~ Garth Kravits

People never sing ... except in the bathroom. Birthing women also make their natural sounds next to running bath water. There is something about the power of water. People are drawn to water, spas, and sacred streams. Women in labor are drawn to water, too. ~ Michel Odent

As a general rule, man strives to avoid labor. Love for work is not at all an inborn characteristic: it is created by economic pressure and social education. One may even say that man is a fairly lazy animal. It is on this quality, in reality, that is founded to a considerable extent all human progress; because if man did not strive to expend his energy economically, did not seek to receive the largest possible quantity of products in return for a small quantity of energy, there would have been no technical development or social culture. ~ Leon Trotsky

The basis of world peace is the teaching which runs through almost all the great religions of the world. "Love thy neighbor as thyself." Christ, some of the other great Jewish teachers, Buddha, all preached it. Their followers forgot it. What is the trouble between capital and labor, what is the trouble in many of our communities, but rather a universal forgetting that this teaching is one of our first obligations. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Conspiracy theories are an irresistible labor-saving device in the face of complexity. ~ Henry Louis Gates

Labor and work, as well as action, are also rooted in natality in so far as they have the task to provide and preserve the world for, to foresee and reckon with, the constant influx of newcomers who are born into the world as strangers. However, of the three, action has the closest connection with the human condition of natality; the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting. In this sense of initiative, an element of action, and therefore of natality, is inherent in all human activities. Moreover, since action is the political activity par excellence, natality, and not mortality, may be the central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical, thought. The ~ Hannah Arendt

There were stories coming out of Thailand that slave labor was being used to catch and process the seafood we eat. They were nearly all from Miramar. Because of reports of widespread labor abuses, several countries are now considering a ban on imports of Thai seafood. ~ Lourdes Garcia-Navarro

As the years passed, new myths arose to explain the mysterious objects the strangers brought from the land of the dead. A nineteenth-century missionary recorded, for example, an African explanation of what happened when captains descended into the holds of their ships to fetch trading goods like cloth. The Africans believed that these goods came not from the ship itself but from a hole that led into the ocean. Sea sprites weave this cloth in an "oceanic factory, and, whenever we need cloth, the captain ... goes to this hole and rings a bell." The sea sprites hand him up their cloth, and the captain "then throws in, as payment, a few dead bodies of black people he has bought from those bad native traders who have bewitched their people and sold them to the white men." The myth was not so far from reality. For what was slavery in the American South, after all, but a system for transforming the labor of black bodies, via cotton plantations, into cloth? ~ Adam Hochschild

To the question how one kind of labor can be measured against another, how the labor of the artisan can be measured against the labor of the artist, how the labor of the strong can be measured against the labor of the weak, the communists can give no answer. ~ Benjamin N. Cardozo

In May 2007, congressional Democrats and the Bush administration agreed to a plan to include environmental and international labor standards in upcoming trade agreements. ~ Nina Easton

Its basic axiom is to be followed by individuals as well as great nations, by Losers and Winners alike. We have demonstrated the workability of the axiom in Vietnam, in Bangladesh, in Biafra, in Palestinian refugee camps, in our own ghettos, in our migrant labor camps, on our Indian reservations, in our institutions for the defective and the deformed and the aged. This is it: Ignore agony. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Equality is the heart and essence of democracy, freedom, and justice, equality of opportunity in industry, in labor unions, schools and colleges, government, politics, and before the law. There must be no dual standards of justice, no dual rights, privileges, duties, or responsibilities of citizenship. No dual forms of freedom. ~ A. Philip Randolph

The wage-earning class the world over are the victims of society. ~ Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

The best prices are not the highest prices, but the prices that encourage the largest volume of production and the largest volume of sales. The best wage rates for labor are not the highest wage rates, but the wage rates that permit full production, full employment and the largest sustained payrolls. The best profits, from the standpoint not only of industry but of labor, are not the lowest profits, but the profits that encourage most people to become employers or to provide more employment than before. ~ Henry Hazlitt

I begin to understand that failure is its own reward. It is in the effort to close the distance between the work imagined and the work achieved wherein it is to be found that the ceaseless labor is the freedom of play, that what's at stake isn't a reflection in the mirror of fame but the escape from the prison of the self. ~ Lewis H. Lapham

In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as 'right-to-work.' It provides no 'rights' and no 'works.' Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining ... . We demand this fraud be stopped. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Apple's approach to career development is yet another way it runs contrary to the norms at other companies. The prevalent attitude for workers in the corporate world is to consider their growth trajectory. What's my path up? How do I get to the next level? Companies, in turn, spend an inordinate amount of time and money grooming their people for new responsibilities. They labor to find just the right place for people. But what if it turns out all that thinking is wrong? What if companies encouraged employees to be satisfied where they are because they're good at what they do, not to mention because that might be what's best for shareholders?

Instead of employees fretting that they were stuck in terminal jobs, what if they exalted in having found their perfect jobs? A certain amount of office politics might evaporate in a corporate culture where career growth is not considered tantamount to professional fulfilment. Shareholders, after all, don't care about fiefdoms and egos. There are many professionals who would find it liberating to work at what they are good at, receive competitive killer compensation, and not have to worry about supervising others or jockeying for higher rungs on an org chart. ~ Adam Lashinsky

If a given idea has been held in the human mind for many generations, as almost all our common ideas have, it takes sincere and continued effort to remove it; and if it is one of the oldest we have in stock, one of the big, common, unquestioned world ideas, vast is the labor of those who seek to change it. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Hard work is painful when life is devoid of purpose. But when you live for something greater than yourself and the gratification of your own ego, then hard work becomes a labor of love. ~ Steve Pavlina

What labor and pains worldlings take to obtain the vain things of this life-to obtain the poor things of this world, which are but shadows and dreams, and mere nothings! ~ Thomas Brooks

Slave labor," said Hermione, breathing hard through her nose. "That's what made this dinner. Slave labor." And she refused to eat another bite. ~ J.K. Rowling

I might have been your zygote. Your fetus. Maybe even your off-spring. But I have never been your son. You have no idea what it means to be a real mother. You think nine months of discomfort and eight hours of labor gives you the right to call yourself 'Mom'? Well, bitch, you're delusional. ~ Ellen Hopkins

I quit my day job the day my daughter was born. I remember flying to Cleveland and hitting a thunderstorm, which caused the plane to lose pressure, and the oxygen masks fell from the ceiling. We felt the plane dropping; the pilot was taking it down to regain cabin pressure. My heart was in my stomach. I found out after landing that her mom was in labor. I did the show and came back to New York. By the time I walked into the hospital, my daughter was being born. She was waiting for me. She's a sweet daddy's girl. She's premed. She has her own pie company. She works for Habitat for Humanity. ~ J. B. Smoove

You are much surer that you are doing good when you pay money to those who work, as the recompense of their labor, than when you give money merely in charity. ~ Samuel Johnson

God works to over throw the ungodly, and increasingly the world will come under the dominion of Christians, not by military aggression, but by godly labor, saving, in vestment, and orientation toward the future ... This is where history is going. The future belongs to the people of God, who obey His laws ~ David Chilton

There is a good deal of solemn cant about the common interests of capital and labor. As matters stand, their only common interest is that of cutting each others throat. ~ Brooks Atkinson

I've spent quality time in the aerospace community, with my service on two presidential commissions, but at heart, I'm an academic. Being an academic means I don't wield power over person, place or thing. I don't command armies; I don't lead labor unions. All I have is the power of thought. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

When the Carlton Club, A Conservative Party bastion in London, was badly damaged by bombs and Churchill remarked that he was surprised that no one had been killed, a Labor Party official replied, "The devil looks after his own. ~ Philip Seib

We hear in these days a great deal respecting rights
the rights of private judgment, the rights of labor, the rights of property, and the rights of man. Rights are grand things, divine things in this world of God's; but the way in which we expound these rights, alas! seems to me to be the very incarnation of selfishness. I can see nothing very noble in a man who is forever going about calling for his own rights. Alas! alas! for the man who feels nothing more grand in this wondrous, divine world than his own rights. ~ Frederick William Robertson

Many of the lower middle class are members of labor unions, churches, bowling clubs, fraternal, service, and nationality organizations. They are organizations and people that must be worked
with as one would work with any other part of our populations - with respect, understanding, and sympathy. ~ Saul Alinsky

It's like we're suffering from an identity crisis, and that identity is in our arts and the fact that we don't find it chief amongst our agendas to teach our kids who we are as a nation and the battles we've had on this ground and how they've been successfully resolved. We can't enjoy the fruits of the labor of our ancestors. ~ Wynton Marsalis

We also know how dangerous it is to simplify society by the use of examples in nature. However, many Americans still value the honey bee as a symbol of thrift and industry. This value seems to be one of the lingering philosophies from seventeenth-century England, in which the royal authorities and clergy dictated that the lower classes and unemployed should be "busy as bees" so they would not rebel. When the English began to label their own members of society as "drones," they privileged a new set of values based on work, thrift, and efficiency. The American Dream still seems to be based on these very values. And if somehow people do not attain the American Dream, we tend to think that they have not worked hard enough or did not save their money - in short, they are too much like drones. It could be argued that many American social policies - so conscious of work, labor, and time - are still based on the beehive model first adopted during the seventeenth century in England. For all its rhetoric of new opportunities, America still sees poverty as a sin, as if somehow the poor aren't thrifty or busy as bees. ~ Tammy Horn

I know that if the peace movement takes its message boldly to the Negro people a powerful force can be secured in pursuit of the greatest goal of all mankind. And the same is true of labor and the great democratic sections of our population. ~ Paul Robeson

I can see clothes of silk, if materials that do not hide the body, nor even one's decency, can be called clothes ... Wretched flocks of maids labor so that the adulteress may be visible through her thin dress, so that her husband has no more acquaintance than any outsider or foreigner with his wife's body. ~ Seneca The Younger