Labor is the fabled magician's wand, the philosophers stone, and the cap of good fortune.
more James Weldon Johnson quotes
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.
more Samuel Johnson quotes
Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them.
more Samuel Johnson quotes
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.
more Jack Kemp quotes
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.
more Thomas Kempis quotes
Government machinery has been described as a marvelous labor saving device which enables ten men to do the work of one.
more John Maynard Keynes quotes
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.

more Matt Kibbe quotes
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.
more Lucy Larcom quotes
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.
more C. S. Lewis quotes
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.
more Abraham Lincoln quotes
All wealth is the product of labor.
more John Locke quotes
[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.
more John Locke quotes
The man who has the will to undergo all labor may win to any good.
more Martin Luther quotes
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.
more James Madison quotes
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.
more James Madison quotes
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.
more Marisa Manley quotes
A single idea, if it is right, saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences.
more Jacques Maritain quotes
Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.
more Karl Marx quotes
Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.
more Karl Marx quotes
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.
more Karl Marx quotes
The poor despise labor when performed by slaves.
more George Mason quotes
He who labors diligently need never despair; for all things are accomplished by diligence and labor.
more Menander quotes
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.
more Ashley Montagu quotes
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.
more National Socialist Party of Germany (NAZI) quotes
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.
more Robert Nisbet quotes
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.
more Grover Norquist quotes
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.
more Robert Nozick quotes
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.
more Kevin O'Leary quotes
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.
more George Orwell quotes
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.
more Dr. Ron Paul quotes
The labor movement means just this: it is the last noble protest of the American people against the power of incorporated wealth.
more Wendell Phillips quotes
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.
more Ayn Rand quotes
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?
more Ayn Rand quotes
...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.
more Ayn Rand quotes
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.
more Ayn Rand quotes
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.

more Jon Rappoport quotes
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.
more Cecil Rhodes quotes
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.
more Paul Craig Roberts quotes
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.
more John D. Rockefeller, Jr. quotes
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.
more Felix Rohatyn quotes
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.
more Theodore Roosevelt quotes
Large fortunes are all founded either on the occupation of land, or lending or the taxation of labor.
more John Ruskin quotes
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!
more Dr. Mary J. Ruwart quotes
It's worth what it's worth when it's worth it.
more Eric Schaub quotes
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.
more Lisa Schiffen quotes
Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.
more Lucius Annaeus Seneca quotes
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.
more Lucius Annaeus Seneca quotes
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.
more Lucius Annaeus Seneca quotes
There is no real wealth but the labor of man.
more Percy Bysshe Shelley quotes
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.
more William Tecumseh Sherman quotes
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