“Intelligence is given every wise opportunity to develop. Unfortunate if it is overclouded by class consciousness. If labor's fear of immigration is only a way of asserting, in an organized plea, labor's right to monopoly, it must be remembered that such an attitude has never been successful, and will not be successful in this case. There are those who leach the laborer that the fewer hours he works, the better off he is. In order to maintain that belief, they have attempted, through organization, to dictate to government. This attitude is against public conscience, against the working of economic law. There was a time, in our country's history, when we believed that leisure meant opportunity. But educated people soon found that opportunity lay not in leisure but in effort; so they went to work. The ideal for rich and poor alike is that any one, through honest effort, may assume and secure any position for which he is fitted.”

— Calvin Coolidge

1920s, Whose Country Is This? (1921)

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Calvin Coolidge 412

American politician, 30th president of the United States (i… 1872–1933

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“For, primarily, the immigrant comes here for economic reasons. If he is a dependent, there is no room for him. If he believes that in America one need not work, there is no room for him. If he has been taught that his labor is a commodity for sale, he must learn that labor is no more a commodity than management. It is the product of labor, the product of management, that is put up for sale. In the last analysis, it is man's intelligence that is purchased. Only in undeveloped countries can man be regarded as a beast of burden.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Whose Country Is This? (1921)

“Now, on the contrary, when every one is to cultivate himself into man, condemning a man to machine-like labor amounts to the same thing as slavery. If a factory-worker must tire himself to death twelve hours and more, he is cut off from becoming man. Every labor is to have the intent that the man be satisfied. […] His labor is nothing taken by itself, has no object in itself, is nothing complete in itself; he labors only into another's hands, and is used (exploited) by this other.”

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

Cambridge 1995, p. 108
The Ego and Its Own (1844)

“The only real formula for real success is Work and Faith. All may achieve this sort of success for all may work and the only happiness, the only success, is in labor.”

Antonio Moreno (1887–1967) Spanish-American film actor and director

Other rewards do not count, comparatively. The joy of leisure is an illusion. The chief reason for my liking serials for as long as I did was because they kept me constantly at work, whereas feature pictures do permit of a week or more idleness in between.
The True Story of My Life http://www.public.asu.edu/~bruce/Taylor57.txt (November 8 - December 13, 1924)

“I shared, naturally, in that hatred of organized labor which has been the one political constant in my lifetime, culminating in Ronald Reagan's most popular gesture, the smashing of the air-controllers' union. No alternative view of organized labor has ever come to us through the popular media. If labor leaders were not crooks like Jimmy Hoffa, they were in the pay of Moscow.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

Source: 1990s, Screening History (1992), Ch. 2: Fire Over England, p. 34

“It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor.”

David Graeber (1961) American anthropologist and anarchist

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Eleven, "Age of the Great Capitalist Empires", p. 350

“Child labor must be abolished by the working class.”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

The Socialist Party and the Working Class (1904)
Context: The working class must be emancipated by the working class.
Woman must be given her true place in society by the working class.
Child labor must be abolished by the working class.
Society must be reconstructed by the working class.
The working class must be employed by the working class.
The fruits of labor must be enjoyed by the working class.
War, bloody war, must be ended by the working class.

“By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.”

Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic

"The Challenge of Renewal"
The Conduct Of Life (1951)

“By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.”

Friedrich Engels book The Communist Manifesto

The Communist Manifesto, footnote (1888 edition)

“Strong, responsible unions are essential to industrial fair play. Without them the labor bargain is wholly one-sided. The parties to the labor contract must be nearly equal in strength if justice is to be worked out, and this means that the workers must be organized and that their organizations must be recognized by employers as a condition precedent to industrial peace.”

Louis Brandeis (1856–1941) American Supreme Court Justice

Reported in Osmond Kessler Fraenkel, Clarence Martin Lewis, The Curse of Bigness: Miscellaneous Papers of Louis D. Brandeis (1965), p. 43.
Extra-judicial writings

“Since the labor-power could be the labor of four, eight, or even twelve hours, the amount of labor expeneded can be augmented. The value of the labor-power is decided by the consumption goods necessary to maintain the life of the worker, making it possible for that person to exist as a human being who expends the same labor today as yesterday.”

Itsurō Sakisaka (1897–1985) Japanese economist

Exploitation of Labor (1967)

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