Labor Quotes

If a little labor, little are our gains. Man's fortunes are according to his pains.

Robert Herrick

Syzygy, inexorable, pancreatic, phantasmagoria --- anyone who can use those four words in one sentence will never have to do manual labor.

W.P. Kinsella

He that hath a trade hath an estate; he that hath a calling hath an office of profit and honor.

Benjamin Franklin

The Lord had given them the day and the Lord had given them the strength. And the day and the strength had been dedicated to labor, and the labor was its reward. Who was the labor for? What would be its fruits? These were irrelevant and idle questions.

Leo Tolstoy

I tell you, sir, the only safeguard of order and discipline in the modern world is a standardized worker with interchangeable parts. That would solve the entire problem of management.

Jean Giraudoux

Even in the meanest sorts of labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work.

Thomas Carlyle

I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.

Thomas Jefferson

He who first shortened the labor of copyists by device of movable types was disbanding hired armies, and cashiering most kings and senates, and creating a whole new democratic world: he had invented the art of printing.

Thomas Carlyle

A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circlue of our felicities.

Thomas Jefferson

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.

Victor Hugo

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

Samuel Johnson

Our labour preserves us from three great evils -- weariness, vice, and want.

Voltaire

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.

Thomas Jefferson

The fruit derived from labor is the sweetest of all pleasures.

Luc De Clapiers

A is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the process, because they know nothing about him and consequently are afraid of him.

George Orwell

Labor, if it were not necessary for existence, would be indispensable for the happiness of man.

Samuel Johnson

Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price.

Samuel Johnson

The acquisition by dishonest means and cunning,' said Levin, feeling that he was incapable of clearly defining the borderline between honesty and dishonesty. 'Like the profits made by banks,' he went on. 'This is evil, I mean, the acquisition of enormous fortunes without work, as it used to be with the spirit monopolists. Only the form has changed. Hardly were the monopolies abolished before railways and banks appeared: just another way of making money without work.

Leo Tolstoy