top of page
"We are always in these days endeavoring to separate intellect and manual labor; we want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen in the best sense."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Labor quotes

"Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance."

"What one state could not get alone, what one miner against a powerful corporation could not achieve, can be achieved by the union."

"Less than 8 percent of private sector workers belonged to a union in 2004, and, overall, only 12.5 percent of American workers carry a union card - down from about one-third of workers in labor's heydays in the 1950s."

"If workers are more insecure, that's very 'healthy' for the society, because if workers are insecure, they won't ask for wages, they won't go on strike, they won't call for benefits; they'll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that's optimal for corporations' economic health."

"Employment is slavery. Workers merely have a choice over where to serve their daily eight-hour sentence."

"Every job from the heart is, ultimately, of equal value. The nurse injects the syringe; the writer slides the pen; the farmer plows the dirt; the comedian draws the laughter. Monetary income is the perfect deceiver of a man's true worth."

"Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind."

"When you are laboring for others let it be with the same zeal as if it were for yourself."

"The necessity of every one paying in his own labor for what he consumes, affords the only legitimate and effectual check to excessive luxury, which has so often ruined individuals, states and empires; and which has now brought almost universal bankruptcy upon us."
Explore more quotes by John Ruskin

"Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance."

"In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it. They must not do too much of it. And they must have a sense of success in it."

"It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us."

"The first duty of a state is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed and educated till it attains years of discretion."

"Education does not mean teaching people what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave."
bottom of page