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

"Large fortunes are all founded either on the occupation of land, or lending or the taxation of labor."

"Employment is the exploitation of the employer's courage, and, the employed's fear of failure."

"Jobs are a part of life. Maybe you've heard of the concept. It's called work? See, what happens is that you suffer through doing annoying and humiliating things until you get paid not enough money. Like those Japanese game shows, only without all the glory."

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

"If employment really cared about employees, people wouldn't have to work until retirement comes to their rescue."

"Does the work get easier once you know what you are doing?''Your lungs grow thick with stone dust and your eyes bleary from the sun and fragments thrown up by the chisel. You pour your lifeblood out into works of stone for Romans who will take your money in taxes to feed soldiers who will nail your people to crosses for wanting to be free. Your back breaks, your bones creak, your wife screeches at you, and your children torment you with open begging mouths, like greedy baby birds in the nest. You go to bed every night so tired and beaten that you pray to the Lord to send the angel of death to take you in your sleep so you don't have to face another morning. It also has its downside."

"I have always been fully persuaded that, through co-operation, labor could become its own employer."
Explore more quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

"Dr. Breed keeps telling me the main thing with Dr. Hoenikker was truth."You don't seem to agree."I don't know whether I agree or not. I just have trouble understandinghow truth, all by itself, could be enough for a person."

"After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, 'Science has now known sin.' And do you know what Father said? He said, 'What is sin?"

"Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something."

"Maybe I did hurt him, but I don't think I could have hurt him much. He was one of the best-protected human beings who ever lives. People couldn't get at him because he just wasn't interested in people."

"As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split."

"The row was actually about everything in creation, but it had for its subject of the moment the boy's mustache."

"[Books] were devices as crassly practical for storing or transmitting language, as the latest Silicon Valley miracles. But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our mind and souls, in a spiritual adventure."

"This much I knew and know: I was making myself hideously uncomfortable by not narrowing my attention to details of life which were immediately important, and by refusing to believe what my neighbors believed."
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