Manual Labour Quotes

The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex. ~ Karl Marx

I was fifteen when I left school. And what did I get to show for my ten years in the British education system? A piece of paper which said:

John Osbourne attended Birchfield Road Secondary Modern.
Signed, Mr Oldham (Headmaster)

That was f**king it. Not a single qualification. Nothing. I had two career choices: manual labour or manual labour. ~ Ozzy Osbourne

The only reason Lenz didn't burst out laughing was because he wasn't alone; his movement - which seemed hidden now inside a second glove, the body of the injured soldier - were mockeries of themselves. Lenz felt as though he was engaged in a kind of manual labour that for him, deep down, was like manipulating shapes in clay or working a piece of wood. Any feelings of empathy were dissolved in professional expertise and in the recognition of his triumph in relation to the body lying on the stretcher. Lenz was alive, on his feet, with his reason intact, and still in control of the use of language: in that room he was the person who determined every Yes and every No - and he had long known that controlling such extreme words was a source of undisputable power.
A startled nurse was asking Dr. Lenz whether he wanted her to pass him another scalpel, one with a fine point, and Lenz replied: No. No, no. Yes, yes,yes.
Let us say that "organic craftsmanship," the most basic craftsmanship, often filled him with enthusiasm. Lenz knew that bullets or bomb shrapnel - in short, all the pieces of metal that find their way into our bodies - were only looking for what any living creature looks for: a shelter, a final home, a home where they can be left alone, where they feel secure. ~ Gonçalo M. Tavares

I have always regarded manual labour as creative and looked with respect-and, yes, wonder-at people who work with their hands. It seems to me that their creativity is no less than that of a violinist or painter. ~ Pablo Casals

Walpole has no intellect. A mere surgeon. A wonderful operator but, after all, what is operating? ... Manual labour. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Beyond the obvious facts that he has at some time done manual labour, that he takes snuff, that he is a Freemason, that he has been in China, and that he has done a considerable amount of writing lately, I can deduce nothing else. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

The way I see it, people are working hard. They're working their fingers to the bone. Or am I looking at things wrong?
That's not hard work. It's just manual labour. ~ Haruki Murakami

Acting is a great way to make a living, especially when I consider what my alternatives were and probably still are. I mean, you are only making movies. It is a lot less pressure than being a surgeon; although it seemed like the only other thing that I was qualified for was manual labour. ~ James Spader

So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour. Once they were there, they would no doubt have to pay rent, and not a little of it, for the ventilation of their caverns; and if they refused, they would starve or be suffocated for arrears. Such of them as were so constituted as to be miserable and rebellious would die; and, in the end, the balance being permanent, the survivors would become as well adapted to the conditions of underground life, and as happy in their way, as the Upper-world people were to theirs. ~ H.G.Wells

There can be no rise in the value of labour without a fall of profits. ~ David Ricardo

Come to thee again! ENTWIFE. When Winter comes, and singing ends; when darkness falls at last; When broken is the barren bough, and light and labour past; I'll look for thee, and wait for thee, until we meet again: Together we will take the road beneath the bitter rain! BOTH. Together we will take the road that leads into the West, And far away will find a land where both our hearts ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

The recent extraordinary discovery in Photography, as applied in the operations of the mind, has reduced the art of novel-writing to the merest mechanical labour. ~ Lewis Carroll

Studying the daily news can appear more interesting than the priesthood lesson manual. Sitting down to rest can be more attractive than making appointments to visit those who need our priesthood service. ~ Henry B. Eyring

What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower the wages of labour.

It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, a merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate.

We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters ra ~ Adam Smith

Overwork is repulsive to human nature - not work. Overwork for supplying the few with luxury - not work for the well-being of all. Work is a physiological necessity, a necessity of spending accumulated bodily energy, a necessity which is health and life itself. If so many branches of useful work are so reluctantly done now, it is merely because they mean overwork, or they are improperly organised. But we know - old Franklin knew it - that four hours of useful work every day would be more than sufficient for supplying everybody with the comfort of a moderately well-to-do middle-class house, if we all gave ourselves to productive work, and if we did not waste our productive powers as we do waste them now. ~ Pyotr Kropotkin

And yet without labour there were no ease, no rest, so much as conceivable. ~ Thomas Carlyle

To create a little flower is the labour of ages. ~ William Blake

How still the morning of the hallow'd day! Mute is the voice of rural labour, hush'd The ploughboy's whistle, and the milkmaid's song. ~ James Grahame

A Sufi manual, the Kashf-al-Mahjub, says that, towards the end of his journey, the dervish becomes the Way not the wayfarer, i.e. a place over which something is passing, not a traveller following his own free will. ~ Bruce Chatwin

The most important lesson of New Labour is this: Every time we made progress we did it by challenging the conventional wisdom. ~ Ed Miliband

At one time, a freethinker was a man who had been brought up in the conceptions of religion, law and morality, who reached freethought only after conflict and difficulty. But now a new type of born freethinkers has appeared, who grow up without so much as hearing that there used to be laws of morality, or religion, that authorities existed ... In the old days, you see, if a man - a Frenchman, for instance- wished to get an education, he would have set to work to study the classics, the theologians, the tragedians, historians and philosophers- and you can realize all the intellectual labour involved. But nowadays he goes straight for the literature of negation, rapidly assimilates the essence of the science of negation, and thinks he's finished. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone.
Kindness in another's trouble,
Courage in your own. ~ Adam Lindsay Gordon

Forth in thy name,O Lord, I go, My daily labour to pursue. Thee, only thee, resolved to know, In all I think or speak or do. ~ Charles Wesley

I write exclusively using computers. Pens and typewriters can fsck right off - I wrote my first half million words in my teens on a manual typewriter (had to trade it for a new one due to keys snapping from metal fatigue) so I am not a pen or typewriter fetishist. ~ Charles Stross

Men Wanted for Dangerous Expedition: Low Wages for Long Hours of Arduous Labour under Brutal Conditions; Months of Continual Darkness and Extreme Cold; Great Risk to Life and Limb from Disease, Accidents and Other Hazards; Small Chance of Fame in Case of Success. ~ Ernest Shackleton

Historically, Labour has used technology as a form of control. We would use pagers and faxes to send out messages telling people what line to take. The key learning from the Obama campaign is to use technology to empower your supporters. ~ Douglas Alexander

Liberalism is a really old British tradition and it has a completely different attitude towards the individual and the relationship between the individual and the state than the collectivist response of Labour, and particularly Old Labour, does. ~ Nick Clegg

[I]f thou loiter when thou shouldst labour, thou wilt lose the crown. O fall to work then speedily and seriously, and bless God that thou hast yet time to do it; and though that which is past cannot be recalled, yet redeem the time now by doubling thy diligence (260). ~ Richard Baxter

Gentlemen, four-fifths of the earth's surface is covered by seas; that is unquestionably too much; the world's surface, the map of oceans and dry land, must be corrected. We shall give the world the workforce of the sea, gentlemen. This will no longer be the style of Captain van Toch; we shall replace the adventure story of pearls by the hymnic paean of labour. ~ Karel Capek

I'm the kind of person who always follows the manual. No shortcuts. ~ Russell Banks

The anointing is what enables us to labour, without having to apply any special effort. The anointing is what overcomes every difficulty that would beset us, that we in our own strength and with our own abilities would normally not be able to cope with. ~ Sunday Adelaja

Faith is not reason's labour, but repose. ~ Neil Young

If the idea of having to change ourselves makes us uncomfortable, we can remain as we are. We can choose rest over labour, entertainment over education, delusion over truth, and doubt over confidence. The choices are ours to make, but while we curse the effect, we continue to nourish the cause ~ Jim Rohn

From Binet, the idea of measuring imagination with inkblots spread to a string of American intelligence-testing pioneers and educators - Dearborn, Sharp, Whipple, Kirkpatrick. It reached Russia as well, where a psychology professor named Fyodor Rybakov, unaware of the Americans' work, included a series of eight blots in his Atlas of the Experimental-Psychology Study of Personality (1910). It was an American, Guy Montrose Whipple, who called his version an "ink-blot test" in his Manual of Mental and Physical Tests (also 1910) - this is why the Rorschach cards would come to be called "inkblots" when American psychologists took them ~ Damion Searls

Jamaica was the Ophir of the West of Scotland in those times. Upon its sugar fields and by the agency of its slave labour, Glasgow slowly emerged from its primeval state of small borough town, to be a business centre, rivalling and soon surpassing Bristol in its West India trade. ~ R.B. Cunninghame Graham

When I stepped from hard manual work to writing, I just stepped from one kind of hard work to another. ~ Sean O'Casey

The American Dream, coupled with government subsidies of utilities and cheap consumer goods courtesy of slave labour somewhere else, has kept the poor huddled masses from rising up. ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

How blest is he who crowns in shades like these A youth of labour with an age of ease! ~ Oliver Goldsmith

Labour together with one another; strive in company together; run together; suffer together; sleep together; and awake together, as the stewards, and associates, [1101] and servants of God. Please ye Him under whom ye fight, and from whom ye receive your wages. Let none of you be found a deserter. Let your baptism endure as your arms; your faith as your helmet; your love as your spear; your patience as a complete panoply. Let your works be the charge [1102] assigned to you, that ye may receive a worthy recompense. Be long-suffering, therefore, with one another, in meekness, as God is towards you. May I have joy of you for ever! [1103] Give ~ Ignatius Of Antioch

I vote Labour and can't begin to acknowledge anything good that comes from a Tory. ~ Paloma Faith