Quotes about Labor

I don't pity any man who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity the creature who does not work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being.

There was no time during the rebellion when I did not think, and often say, that the South was more to be benefited by its defeat than the North. The latter had the people, the institutions, and the territory to make a great and prosperous nation. The former was burdened with an institution abhorrent to all civilized people not brought up under it, and one which degraded labor, kept it in ignorance, and enervated the governing class.

Work is the law; whoever spurns it as tiresome will have it as punishment

Love turns work into rest.

As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, I hereupon offer my own poor endeavors.

Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire, called conscience.

It is work, work that one delights in, that is the surest guarantor of happiness. But even here it is a work that has to be earned by labor in one's earlier years. One should labor so hard in youth that everything one does subsequently is easy by comparison.

To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.

The farmers may be the backbone of the country, but who wants to be a backbone?

The few who profit from the labor of the masses want to organize the workers into an army which will protect the interests of the capitalists.

The man who builds a factory builds a temple, that the man who works there worships there, and to each is due, not scorn and blame, but reverence and praise.

The world of efficiency and anonymity dehumanises us. We have to ask who the invisible people are. Who makes our clothes? Who picks our vegetables? And how are they treated?