Thou, O God, dost sell us all good things at the price of labour.
LEONARDO DA VINCI, Thoughts on Art and Life
Labour is the root of riches.
Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.
ANATOLE FRANCE, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard
I am glad to know that there is a system of labor where the laborer can strike if he wants to. I wish to God that such a system prevailed all over the world.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN, speech, Mar. 5, 1860
There are some with brains and some without. It makes for a better division of labour.
BERTOLT BRECHT, Baal
Communism deprives no man of the ability to appropriate the fruits of his labour. The only thing it deprives him of is the ability to enslave others by means of such appropriations.
KARL MARX, The Communist Manifesto
- How happy he who crowns in shades like these,
- A youth of labour with an age of ease.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH, The Deserted Village
The labor unions are group efforts in the direction of democracy. Like the political efforts in the same direction, they become many times stultified and lead up blind alleys. But the effort creates power. While the economic gains are themselves important and are measures of strength, the significance of the labor union is its assertion of the manhood of labor.
HELEN MAROT, American Labor Unions
No man will labor for himself who can make another labor for him.
THOMAS JEFFERSON, Notes on Virginia
The efforts of a boy to avoid labor often sum up more than the original task.
Fame lightens labour.
Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.
Capital is a result of labor, and is used by labor to assist it in further production. Labor is the active and initial force, and labor is therefore the employer of capital.
HENRY GEORGE, Progress and Poverty
- Labour is good for a man, bracing up his energies to conquest,
- And without it life is dull, the man perceiving himself useless.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER, Proverbial Philosophy
It is better to drink the wine of industry from an earthen cup, than the wine of indolence from a silver tankard.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY, Proverbs
Pleasure is labour too, and tires as much.
Labor, with its coarse raiment and its bare right arm, has gone forth in the earth, achieving the truest conquests and rearing the most durable monuments. It has opened the domain of matter and the empire of the mind. The wild beast has fled before it, and the wilderness has fallen back.... its triumphal march is the progress of civilization.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
There is no right more universal and more sacred, because lying so near the root of existence, than the right of men to their own labor.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Such is the supreme folly of man that he labours so as to labour no more.
LEONARDO DA VINCI, Thoughts on Art and Life
There can be no general prosperity where labor has small reward.
What is earned with hard labor is eaten with pleasure.
- The lot of man is ceaseless labor,
- Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder.
Love labour: for if thou dost not want it for food, thou mayest for physique. It is wholesome for the body, and good for the mind. It prevents the fruits of idleness, which many times come of nothing to do, and leads many to do what is worse than nothing.
WILLIAM PENN, Some Fruits of Solitude
Our experience tells us what is labour and recreation.
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