379 Quotes About Labor

In another thirty to fifty years, the demand for cheap labor will have produced even more machines over the employment of actual humans. And in that time frame, humans will have lost their voice, their power, all freedoms, and all worth. It is inevitable that machines will one day become the ultimate enemies of mankind. We are not evolving or progressing with our technology, only regressing. Technology is our friend today, but will be our enemy in the future.

No matter how much falls on us, we keep plowing ahead. That's the only way to keep the roads clear.

Despite all our amazing ability, ingenuity, technology and industry humans are the one species who have not mastered the art of simplicity.

Those who condemn the product of other people's labour make their own labour unproductive.

It was piecework, and she was apt to have a family to keep alive; and stern and ruthless economic laws had arranged it that she could only do this by working just as she did, with all her soul upon her work, and with never an instant for a glance at the well-dressed ladies and gentlemen who came to stare at her, as at some wild beast in a menagerie.

It is the principal paradox of this period that the only sphere of our economic system in which government intervention is urgently necessary is also the only point at which action of the State is now effectively inhibited. It is in the region of wages and prices that we really require the continual economic leadership of government, but in our prevailing trade structure any such suggestion has come to be regarded as impious.

[M]ost American workplaces operate in ways that make it almost impossible for anyone to speak truth to power or challenge the status quo and be able to thrive or advance in their career. 'If you dare to open your mouth, you basically ruin your career,' is one of the most common lines I hear from people when I ask them about what usually stops them from saying or doing what they see as the right thing to do.

The world is administered by rich but it is constructed by poor.

It is interesting that a guy like W.E.B. Du Bois, who actually did very little, I should imagine, with his hands, wrote about "I am the smoke king." Without the labor, both free and slave, of African Americans this country would still be a wilderness.