In proportion as the machine is improved and performs man’s work with an ever increasing rapidity and exactness, the labourer, instead of prolonging his former rest times, redoubles his ardour, as if he wished to rival the machine. O, absurd and murderous competition!

Healthy in body and mind, I end my life before pitiless old age which has taken from me my pleasures and joys one after another; and which has been stripping me of my physical and mental powers, can paralyse my energy and break my will, making me a burden to myself and to others.

The bourgeoisie, when it was struggling against the nobility sustained by the clergy, hoisted the flag of free thought and atheism; but once triumphant, it changed its tone and manner and today it uses religion to support its economic and political supremacy.

Cannot the labourers understand that by over-working themselves they exhaust their own strength and that of their progeny, that they are used up and long before their time come to be incapable of any work at all, that absorbed and brutalized by this single vice they are no longer men but pieces of men, that they kill within themselves all beautiful faculties, to leave nothing alive and flourishing except the furious madness for work.

Trabajad, trabajad, proletarios, para aumentar la fortuna social y vuestras miseriasindividuales; trabajad, trabajad para que, haciéndoos cada vez más pobres, tengáis másrazón de trabajar y de ser miserables." (1848, 11) Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy

Si, déracinant de son coeur le vice qui la domine et avilit sa nature, la classe ouvrière se levait dans sa force terrible, non pour réclamer les Droits de l’homme, qui ne sont que les droits de l’exploitation capitaliste, non pour réclamer le Droit au travail, qui n’est que le droit à la misère, mais pour forger une loi d’airain, défendant à tout homme de travailler plus de trois heures par jour, la Terre, la vieille Terre, frémissant d’allégresse, sentirait bondir en elle un nouvel univers…

Yoksul uluslarda halkın rahatı yerindedir.Zengin uluslardaysa, halk, genellikle yoksuldur.

Our epoch has been called the century of work. It is in fact the century of pain, misery and corruption.

O Laziness, mother of the arts and noble virtues, be thou the balm of human anguish.

In proportion as the machine is improved and performs man's work with an ever increasing rapidity and exactness, the labourer, instead of prolonging his former rest times, redoubles his ardour, as if he wished to rival the machine. O, absurd and murderous competition!