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|  Felix Adler | In a country of such recent civilization as ours, whose almost limitless treasures of material wealth invite the risks of capital and the industry of labor, it is but natural that material interests should absorb the attention of the people to a degree elsewhere unknown. | |
| Aristotle | The end of labor is to gain leisure. | |
| Mikhail Bakunin | The communism of Marx seeks a strong state centralization, and where this exists, there the parasitic Jewish nation -- which speculates upon the labor of people - will always find the means for its existence. | |
| Doug Bandow | Being paid by the government to shelve books in a library, whether as an employee or as an Americorps member, is no more laudable or valuable than being paid by Crown Books to stock bookshelves in a bookstore. A host of private-sector jobs provide enormous public benefits—consider health care professionals, medical and scientific researchers, entrepreneurs, inventors, and artists. Many of these people earn less than they could in alternative work; they have chosen to serve in their own way. Yet government programs that equate public employment with service to society effectively denigrate service through private employment. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | A Fatal Tendency of Mankind. Self-preservation and self-development are common aspirations among all people. And if everyone enjoyed the unrestricted use of his faculties and the free disposition of the fruits of his labor, social progress would be ceaseless, uninterrupted, and unfailing. But there is also another tendency that is common among people. When they can, they wish to live and prosper at the expense of others. This is no rash accusation. Nor does it come from a gloomy and uncharitable spirit. The annals of history bear witness to the truth of it: the incessant wars, mass migrations, religious persecutions, universal slavery, dishonesty in commerce, and monopolies. This fatal desire has its origin in the very nature of man -- in that primitive, universal, and insuppressible instinct that impels him to satisfy his desires with the least possible pain. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | And what is this liberty, whose very name makes the heart beat faster and shakes the world? Is it not the union of all liberties -- liberty of conscience, of education, of association, of the press, of travel, of labor, of trade? | |
| Buddha | Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it. | |
| Robert Burns | Dare to be honest and fear no labor. | |
| Albert Camus | The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor. | |
| Dr. Ben Carson | My mother worked as a domestic, two, sometimes three jobs at a time because she didn’t want to be on welfare. She felt very strongly that if she gave up and went on welfare, that she would give up control of her life and of our lives, and I think she was probably correct about that. … But, one thing that she provided us was a tremendous example of what hard work is like. | |
| William Ellery Channing | Undoubtedly a man is to labor to better his condition, but first to better himself. | |
| Mary Ellen Chase | Manual labor to my father was not only good and decent for it's own sake but, as he was given to saying, it straightened out one's thoughts. | |
| Salmon P. Chase | If Congress sees fit to impose a capitation, or other direct tax, it must be laid in proportion to the census; if Congress determines to impose duties, imposts, and excises, they must be uniform throughout the United States. These are not strictly limitations of power. They are rules prescribing the mode in which it shall be exercised. ... This review shows that personal property, contracts, occupations, and the like have never been regarded by Congress as proper subjects of direct tax. | |
| Noam Chomsky | In the late 19th century there was a major union organization, Knights of Labor, and also a radical populist movement based on farmers. It's hard to believe, but it was based in Texas, and it was quite radical. They wanted their own banks, their own cooperatives, their own control over sales and commerce. | |
| William Cobbett | The tendency of taxation is to create a class of persons who do not labor, to take from those who do labor the produce of that labor, and to give it to those who do not labor. | |
| Calvin Coolidge | I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom. Until we can reestablish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very severe and distinct curtailment of our liberty. | |
| William Cowper | Absence of occupation is not rest,\\A mind quite vacant is a mind distress'd. | |
| Luc de Clapiers | The fruit derived from labor is the sweetest of pleasures. | |
| Thomas Dekker | Honest labor bears a lovely face. | |
| Frederick Douglass | The non-producers now receive the larger share of what those who labor produce. The result is natural. Discontent culminates in exactly the same ratio that intelligence sustains aspiration. | |
| Frederick Douglass | We may explain success mainly by one word and that word is WORK! WORK!! WORK!!! WORK!!!! Not transient and fitful effort, but patient, enduring, honest, unremitting, and indefatigable work, into which the whole heart is put. | |
| William Faulkner | Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. | |
| Milton Friedman | [U]nemployment is ... a side effect of the cure for inflation. | |
| Milton Friedman | We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork. | |
| Milton Friedman | With respect to teachers' salaries .... Poor teachers are grossly overpaid and good teachers grossly underpaid. Salary schedules tend to be uniform and determined far more by seniority. | |
| Milton Friedman | The unions might be good for the people who are in the unions but it doesn't do a thing for the people who are unemployed. Because the union keeps down the number of jobs, it doesn't do a thing for them. | |
| Milton Friedman | The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy. | |
| David Frost | Vote Labor, and you build castles in the air. Vote Conservative, and you can live in them. | |
| John Kenneth Galbraith | The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state. | |
| Indira Gandhi | My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | The seven blunders that human society commits and cause all the violence: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, and politics without principles. | |
| Henry George | 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 | Private ownership of land is the nether mill-stone. Material progress is the upper mill-stone. Between them, with an increasing pressure, the working classes are being ground. | |
| Andre Gide | Art begins with resistance - at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor. | |
| Gerald Gilder | If government could create jobs and raise children, socialism would have worked. | |
| Joseph Paul Goebbels | We are a workers’ party because we see in the coming battle between finance and labor the beginning and the end of the structure of the twentieth century. We are on the side of labor and against finance ... The value of labor under socialism will be determined by its value to the state, to the whole community. Labor means creating value, not haggling over things. | |
| Joseph Paul Goebbels | What does anti-Semitism have to do with socialism? I would put the question this way: What does the Jew have to do with socialism? Socialism has to do with labor. When did one ever see him working instead of plundering, stealing and living from the sweat of others? As socialists we are opponents of the Jews because we see in the Hebrews the incarnation of capitalism. | |
| Ulysses S. Grant | Labor disgraces no man; unfortunately, you occasionally find men who disgrace labor. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | It is the advertiser who provides the paper for the subscriber. It is not to be disputed, that the publisher of a newspaper in this country, without a very exhaustive advertising support, would receive less reward for his labor than the humblest mechanic. | |
| Dag Hammarskjold | It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses. | |
| Gordon B. Hinckley | There is no substitute under the heavens for productive labor. It is the process by which dreams become realities. It is the process by which idle visions become dynamic achievements. | |
| William P. Hoar | If ... our bureaucratic masters are becoming more akin to Soviet-style or Eastern European counterparts, it was rarely seen as a plus that those central schemers had wonderful intentions with their five-year plans. Such goals as "job safety," "equality," and freedom from "discrimination," depending on their definitions, may be good things for society, but they were never intended to be the business of the federal government. | |
| Jimmy Hoffa | Don't let any man into your cab, your home, or your heart, unless he's a friend of labor. | |
| Jacob G. Hornberger | Contrary to everything our rulers tell us, and everything that our schoolteachers are teaching the children of this nation, the biggest threat to the lives and well-being of the American people lies not with some foreign government. The biggest threat to the American people today lies with the United States government. And while gun ownership stands as a barrier to potential, Nazi-like behavior, the long-term solution is to dismantle, not reform, the iron fist of the welfare state and the controlled economy. This includes the end (not the reform) of the IRS, the DEA, the BATF, the SEC, the FDA, HUD, the departments of HHS, Labor, Agriculture, and Energy, and every other agency that takes money from some and gives it to others or interferes with peaceful behavior. It entails the repeal of all laws that permit such conduct. And it means the privatization of most of the bureaucrats who work for the U.S. government. | |
| Jacob G. Hornberger | [D]ecade after decade, through taxes and regulations, governments at all levels took ever-increasing control over people’s lives, wealth, and property. The control grew exponentially, decade after decade. The rationale was that the control was necessary -- for society, for the poor, for the nation, even for freedom itself. Americans continued living their life of the lie: they continued believing that the more control government exercised over their lives and property, the freer they became. | |
| David Hume | Everything in the world is purchased by labor. | |
| Bill Hybels | Dignity does not float down from heaven it cannot be purchased nor manufactured. It is a reward reserved for those who labor with diligence. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | Every man is dishonest who lives upon the labor of others, no matter if he occupies a throne. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | No man will labor for himself who can make another labor for him. | |
| Ben Johnson | I have never met a more dedicated bunch of people than I did working in the union, at every level. The work is difficult and demanding, and very few people would do it if they didn’t believe in its righteousness. However, the conviction that you know what’s best insulates you against reflecting morally on your own actions and it teaches you to begin assessing morality in terms of either the ends justifying the means, or even worse, of mere good intention justifying those means. | |
| James Weldon Johnson | Labor is the fabled magician's wand, the philosophers stone, and the cap of good fortune. | |
| Samuel Johnson | 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 | Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them. | |
| Jack Kemp | Taxes on capital, taxes on labor, inflation, bureaucratic regulation, minimum wage laws, are all - to different degrees - unnecessary slices of the wedge that stand between an individual's effort and reward for that effort. | |
| Thomas Kempis | But because many endeavor to get knowledge rather than to live well, they are often deceived and reap little or no benefit from their labor. | |
| John Maynard Keynes | Government machinery has been described as a marvelous labor saving device which enables ten men to do the work of one. | |
| Matt Kibbe | The Rules for Liberty\\\\
1) Don’t hurt people: Free people just want to be left alone, not hassled or harmed by someone else with an agenda or designs over their life and property.\\
2) Don’t take people’s stuff: America’s founders fought to ensure property rights and our individual right to the fruits of our labors.\\
3) Take responsibility: Liberty takes responsibility. Don’t sit around waiting for someone else to solve your problems.\\
4) Work for it: For every action there is an equal reaction. Work hard and you’ll be rewarded.\\
5) Mind your own business: Free people live and let live.\\
6) Fight the power: Thanks to the Internet and the decentralization of knowledge, there are more opportunities than ever to take a stand against corrupt authority. | |
| Lucy Larcom | Labor, in itself, is neither elevating or otherwise. It is the laborer's privilege to ennoble his work by the aim with which he undertakes it, and by the enthusiasm and faithfulness he puts into it. | |
| C. S. Lewis | To live his life in his own way, to call his house his castle, to enjoy the fruits of his own labour, to educate his children as his conscience directs, to save for their prosperity after his death --- these are wishes deeply ingrained in civilised man. Their realization is almost as necessary to our virtues as to our happiness. From their total frustration disastrous results both moral and psychological might follow. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. | |
| John Locke | All wealth is the product of labor. | |
| John Locke | [E]very Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. The great and chief end therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property. | |
| Martin Luther | The man who has the will to undergo all labor may win to any good. | |
| James Madison | I own myself the friend to a very free system of commerce, and hold it as a truth,
that commercial shackles are generally unjust, oppressive and impolitic -- it is also a
truth, that if industry and labour are left to take their own course, they will generally
be directed to those objects which are the most productive, and this in a more certain
and direct manner than the wisdom of the most enlightened legislature could point
out. | |
| James Madison | By rendering the labor of one, the property of the other, they cherish pride, luxury, and vanity on one side; on the other, vice and servility, or hatred and revolt. | |
| Marisa Manley | Since time immemorial, governments have claimed moral superiority. Yet they use laws to loot the productive wealth of working people and build palaces, pyramids, religious monuments, military forces, and other symbols of their power. | |
| Jacques Maritain | A single idea, if it is right, saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences. | |
| Karl Marx | The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together. | |
| Karl Marx | Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor. | |
| Karl Marx | Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks. | |
| George Mason | The poor despise labor when performed by slaves. | |
| Menander | He who labors diligently need never despair; for all things are accomplished by diligence and labor. | |
| Ashley Montagu | It is work, work that one delights in, that is the surest guarantor of happiness. But even here it is a work that has to be earned by labor in one's earlier years. One should labor so hard in youth that everything one does subsequently is easy by comparison. | |
| National Socialist Party of Germany (NAZI) | We ask that government undertake the obligation above all of providing citizens with adequate opportunity for employment and earning a living. The activities of the individual must not be allowed to clash with the interests of the community, but must take place within the confines and be for the good of all. Therefore, we demand: ... an end to the power of financial interest. We demand profit sharing in big business. We demand a broad extension of care for the aged. We demand ... the greatest possible consideration of small business in the purchases of the national, state, and municipal governments. In order to make possible to every capable and industrious [citizen] the attainment of higher education and thus the achievement of a post of leadership, the government must provide an all-around enlargement of our system of public education.... We demand the education at government expense of gifted children of poor parents.... The government must undertake the improvement of public health -- by protecting mother and child, by prohibiting child labor -- by the greatest possible support for all groups concerned with the physical education of youth. [W]e combat the ... materialistic spirit within and without us, and are convinced that a permanent recovery of our people can only proceed from within on the foundation of The Common Good Before the Individual Good. | |
| Robert Nisbet | Very commonly in ages when civil rights of one kind are in evidence – those pertaining to freedom of speech and thought in, say, theater, press, and forum, with obscenity and libel laws correspondingly loosened – very real constrictions of individual liberty take place in other, more vital areas: political organization, voluntary association, property, and the right to hold jobs, for example. | |
| Grover Norquist | The Democratic Party is made up of trial lawyers, labor unions, government employees, big city political machines, the coercive utopians, the radical environmentalists, feminists, and others who want to restructure society with tax dollars and government fiat. | |
| Robert Nozick | Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone’s labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities. | |
| Kevin O'Leary | All businesses require capital, management and labor, and business executives, wanting to grow and maintain profitable enterprises, have a strong incentive to keep costs, including labor, as low as possible. | |
| George Orwell | The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. | |
| Dr. Ron Paul | You don't have a right to the fruits of somebody else's labor. You don't have a right to a house, you don't have a right to a job, you don't have a right to medical care. You have a right to your life, you have your right to your liberty, you have a right to keep what your earn. And that's what produces prosperity. So you want equal justice. And this is not hard for me to argue, because if you really are compassionate and you care about people, the freer the society the more prosperous it is, and more likely that you are going to have medical care... When you turn it over to central economic planning, they're bound to make mistakes. The bureaucrats and the special interests and the Halliburtons are going to make the money. Whether it's war, or Katrina, these noncompetitive contracts, the bureaucrats make a lot of money and you end up with inefficiency. | |
| Wendell Phillips | The labor movement means just this: it is the last noble protest of the American people against the power of incorporated wealth. | |
| Ayn Rand | When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the
effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those
pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper which should have been gold, are a token of
honor—your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there
are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. | |
| Ayn Rand | America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to "the common good," but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance -- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way. | |
| Ayn Rand | Let anyone who believes that a high standard of living is the achievement of labor unions and government controls ask himself the following question: If one had a “time machine” and transported the united labor chieftains of America, plus three million government bureaucrats, back to the tenth century—would they be able to provide the medieval serf with electric light, refrigerators, automobiles, and television sets? | |
| Ayn Rand | ...and we must consider," Austen Heller was saying unemotionally, "that
since--unfortunately--we are forced to live together, the most important thing
for us to remember is that the only way in which we can have any law at all is
to have as little of it as possible. I see no ethical standard to which to
measure the whole unethical conception of a State, except in the amount of time,
of thought, of money, of effort and of obedience, which a society extorts from
its every member. Its value and its civilization are in inverse ratio to that
extortion. There is no conceivable law by which a man can be forced to work on
any terms except those he chooses to set. There is no conceivable law to prevent
him from setting them--just as there is none to force his employer to accept
them. The freedom to agree or disagree is the foundation of our kind of
society--and the freedom to strike is a part of it. I am mentioning this as a
reminder to a certain Petronius from Hell’s Kitchen, an exquisite bastard who
has been rather noisy lately about telling us that this strike represents a
destruction of law and order. | |
| Jon Rappoport | Socialism is: \\
The taking of money (taxes) from some people who work for it and giving it to others who don't work for it. On a grand scale. \\
The vast expansion of freebies doled out by central government. In order to create and sustain dependence. \\
The government protection of favored persons and corporations, permitting them and aiding them to expand their fortunes without limit, regardless of what crimes they commit in the process. (Monsanto would be a fine example.) \\
The squeezing out of those who would compete with the favored persons and corporations. \\
The dictatorship by and for the very wealthy, pretending to be the servant of the masses. \\
The lie that the dictatorship is being run by the masses. \\
The gradual lowering of the standard of living for the overwhelming number of people. \\
The propaganda claiming socialism is the path to a better world for all. \\ \\
In other words, socialism is a protection racket and a long con and a heartless system of elite control, posing as the greatest good.
It is just another form of top-down tyranny---as old as the hills. | |
| Cecil Rhodes | We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labor that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories. | |
| Paul Craig Roberts | According to the Tax Foundation, the average American worker works 127 days of the year just to pay his taxes. That means
that government owns 36 percent of the average American’s output—which is more than feudal serfs owed the robber barons. That 36 percent is more than the average American spends on food, clothing and housing. In other words, if it were not for taxes, the average American’s living standard would at least double. | |
| John D. Rockefeller, Jr. | I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living. | |
| Felix Rohatyn | Fairness does not require the redistribution of wealth; it requires the creation of wealth, geared to an economy that can provide employment for everyone able and willing to work. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. | |
| John Ruskin | Large fortunes are all founded either on the occupation of land, or lending or the taxation of labor. | |
| Dr. Mary J. Ruwart | In the late 1980s, Soviets were allowed to keep the wealth they created by raising vegetables on their garden plots. Although these plots composed only about 2% of the agricultural lands in the Soviet Union, they produced 25% of the food! When Soviets kept the wealth they created, they produced almost 16 times more than when it was taken from them at gunpoint, if necessary! | |
| Eric Schaub | It's worth what it's worth when it's worth it. | |
| Lisa Schiffen | Families would be in better shape if our tax code didn’t push married mothers who wish to raise their own children into the labor force, in large part to pay for a welfare state that encourages unskilled, unmarried teenagers to bear illegitimate children the rest of us must support. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | The much occupied man has no time for wantonness, and it is an obvious commonplace that the evils of leisure can be shaken off by hard work. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Toward good men God has the mind of a father, he cherishes for them a manly love, and he says, "Let them be harassed by toil, by suffering, by losses, in order that they may gather true strength." Bodies grown fat through sloth are weak, and not only labour, but even movement and their very weight cause them to break down. Unimpaired prosperity cannot withstand a single blow; but he who has struggled constantly with his ills becomes hardened through suffering; and yields to no misfortune; nay, even if he falls, he still fights upon his knees. | |
| Percy Bysshe Shelley | There is no real wealth but the labor of man. | |
| William Tecumseh Sherman | There will soon come an armed contest between capital and labor. They will oppose each other, not with words and arguments, but with shot and shell, gun-powder and cannon. The better classes are tired of the insane howling of the lower strata and they mean to stop them. | |
| Adam Smith | Labor was the first price, the original purchase - money that was paid for all things. | |
| Adam Smith | Labor was the first price, the original purchase - money that was paid for all things. | |
| Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | I would like to call upon America to be more careful with its trust ... and prevent those ... because of short-sightedness and still others out of self-interest, from falsely using the struggle for peace and for social justice to lead you down a false road. Because they are trying to weaken you; they are trying to disarm your strong and magnificent country in the face of this fearful threat. ... I call upon you: ordinary working men of America ... do not let yourselves become weak. | |
| Sophocles | Without labor nothing prospers. | |
| Lysander Spooner | A man who is without capital, and who, by prohibitions upon banking, is practically forbidden to hire any, is in a condition elevated but one degree above that of a chattel slave. He may live; but he can live only as the servant of others; compelled to perform such labor, and to perform it at such prices, as they may see fit to dictate. | |
| Leland Stanford | The production of wealth is the result of agreement between labor and capital, between employer and employed. Its distribution, therefore, will follow the law of its creation, or great injustice will be done. | |
| Leland Stanford | When money is controlled by a few it gives that few an undue power and control over labor and the resources of the country. Labor will have its best return when the laborer can control its disposal. | |
| Philip Stanhope | I am very sure that any man of common understanding may, by culture, care, attention, and labor, make himself what- ever he pleases, except a great poet. | |
| Elizabeth Cady Stanton | We are the only class in history that has been left to fight its battles alone, unaided by the ruling powers. White labor and the freed black men had their champions, but where are ours? | |
| Gloria Steinem | No man can call himself liberal, or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his work depends in any way on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women at home, or in the office. | |
| William Howard Taft | Socialism proposes no adequate substitute for the motive of enlightened selfishness that today is at the basis of all human labor and effort, enterprise and new activity. | |
| Nikola Tesla | In the twenty-first century, the robot will take the place which slave labor occupied in ancient civilization. | |
| Margaret Thatcher | I think they've made the biggest financial mess that any government's ever made in this country for a very long time, and Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them. They then start to nationalise everything, and people just do not like more and more nationalisation, and they're now trying to control everything by other means. They're progressively reducing the choice available to ordinary people. | |
| Margaret Thatcher | But don't forget that we fought a 1974 election on saying really that pay couldn't go on going up as it was. The important thing … you must never look at pay on its own, what you've got to look at is pay in relation to the amount produced. It's when those two get badly out of line that you get inflation. And now obviously, we've got very much higher pay, but we're producing less than we were in 1970, so it's the relationship that you've got to watch. Don't look at pay separately. Once you start to cut off a man's pay from the fruits of his labour, he will inevitably feel enormous resentment. If he's going to work harder, of course he deserves more pay, and he doesn't want it all taken away in tax. But there are two sides of the equation you've got to look at. | |
| Margaret Thatcher | Jobs really come in the productive sector of the economy. The real jobs are where people are producing goods or services which other people will buy. Now, dependent on those people producing those goods, are a lot of others in the public sector. Now if you run up the public sector, you can only do it by draining money out of industry and commerce. But that's where the jobs are. And one of the reasons why you have to cut public expenditure is to get the money back out of the public sector, into industry and commerce, so that they, in fact, can invest, and improve, and expand; because that's where the secure jobs are. | |
| Paul Thiel | Let me get this straight. For the past quarter-century or more, the central government has been stealing hundreds of billions of dollars
each year from competent, hard-working, successful people and giving it to incompetent, lazy failures. As a result, middle-class America has
increasingly been impoverished while the poor are even poorer. Now come calls for reforming the system, and liberals are denouncing reformers in
the vilest language. What planet did you say liberals are from? | |
| James Thornton | Before the creation of the welfare state, immigrants who came to this country were for the most part attracted by America’s
reputation as a land of freedom and opportunity. Laws and customs that then prevailed required immigrants to carve out their individual destinies by
their own labor, perseverance, intelligence, and determination. | |
| Vincent van Gogh | The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore. | |
| Ludwig von Mises | Once it has been perceived that the division of labour is the essence of society,
nothing remains of the antithesis between individual and society.
The contradiction between individual principle and social principle disappears. | |
| Ludwig von Mises | Modern society, based as it is on the division of labor, can be preserved only under conditions of lasting peace. | |
| Josiah Warren | 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. | |
| Booker T. Washington | Dignify and glorify common labor. It is at the bottom of life that we must begin, not at the top. | |
| Daniel Webster | He who tampers with the currency robs labor of its bread. | |
| Daniel Webster | Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts will follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization. | |
| Ellen G. White | It is labor that keeps the strong man strong. And spiritual labor, toil and burden-bearing, is what will give strength to the church of Christ. | |
| George Will | Progressives understand that their program for a government-centered society becomes more plausible the more people believe that work -- individual striving -- is unavailing. Government grows as fatalism grows, and fatalism grows as progressivism inculcates in people the demoralizing -- make that de-moralizing -- belief that they are victims of circumstances. | |
| Harold Wilson | The monarchy is a labor intensive industry. | |
| Frances Wright | It will appear evident upon attentive consideration that equality of intellectual and physical advantages is the only sure foundation of liberty, and that such equality may best, and perhaps only, be obtained by a union of interests and cooperation in labor. | |
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