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"One of the saddest things is the only thing a man can do for 8 hours a day day after day is work. You can't eat 8 hours a day nor drink for 8 hours a day nor make love for 8 hours."
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"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."

"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."

"Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that. How did it become so easy?"
Explore more quotes by William Faulkner


"Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting."


"It was too late. Maybe yesterday, while I was still a child, but not now. I knew too much, had seen too much, I was a child no longer now; innocence and childhood were forever lost, forever gone from me."


"It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the natural grayness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. "That was all I wanted," he thinks, in a quiet and slow amazement. "That was all, for thirty years. That didn't seem to be a whole lot to ask in thirty years."


"Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth."


"Who owned no property and never desired to since the earth was no man's but all men's, as light and air and weather were."


"A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction."


"It's not when you realise that nothing can help you - religion, pride, anything - it's when you realise that you don't need any aid."


"Listen: it's got to be all honeymoon, always. Either heaven, or hell: no comfortable safe peaceful purgatory between for you and me to wait in until good behavior or forbearance or shame or repentance overtakes us."


"It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does."
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