“The insignificant labor, the great create.”

“No work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

“Art begins with resistance — at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.”

André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist

“The outward efforts will never be insignificant if the inner light is great.”

Michael Elmore-Meegan (1959) British humanitarian

“You'll come to learn a great deal if you study the Insignificant in depth.”

Odysseas Elytis (1911–1996) Greek poet and art critic

“History is a great teacher. Now everyone knows that the labor movement did not diminish the strength of the nation but enlarged it. By raising the living standards of millions, labor miraculously created a market for industry and lifted the whole nation to undreamed of levels of production. Those who attack labor forget these simple truths, but history remembers them.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

“So vast the labor to create
The fabric of the Roman state!”

John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar

“War may achieve a redistribution of resources, but labor, not war, creates wealth.”

Kenneth N. Waltz book Man, the State, and War

“Melody and harmony are like lines and colors in pictures. A simple linear picture may be completely beautiful; the introduction of color may make it vague and insignificant. Yet color may, by combination with lines, create great pictures, so long as it does not smother and destroy their value.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

“The capitalist mode acts to accumulate capital through the hiring of labor power, but is marked by the cyclical alternation of labor mobilization and labor displacement; each intake of labor power uproots some prior adaptation, while each sloughing off of labor power creates a new cohort of the unemployed.”

Eric Wolf (1923–1999) American anthropologist