“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living.”

— Buckminster Fuller

"The New York Magazine Environmental Teach-In" by Elizabeth Barlow in New York Magazine (30 March 1970), p. 30 http://books.google.com/books?id=cccDAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover#PPA30,M1
1970s
Context: We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

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Buckminster Fuller 171

American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inv… 1895–1983

Jean-Antoine Gleizes (1773–1843) French writer

Thalysie: the New Existence. Quoted in The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-eating https://archive.org/stream/ethicsofdietcate00will/ethicsofdietcate00will#page/n3/mode/2up by Howard Williams (London: F. Pitman, 1883), pp. 216-217.

“But I'm here to say to you this morning that some things are right and some things are wrong. Eternally so, absolutely so. It's wrong to hate. It always has been wrong and it always will be wrong. It's wrong in America, it's wrong in Germany, it's wrong in Russia, it's wrong in China. It was wrong in 2000 B.C., and it's wrong in 1954 A.D. It always has been wrong, and it always will be wrong. It's wrong to throw our lives away in riotous living. No matter if everybody in Detroit is doing it, it's wrong. It always will be wrong, and it always has been wrong. It's wrong in every age and it's wrong in every nation. Some things are right and some things are wrong, no matter if everybody is doing the contrary. Some things in this universe are absolute. The God of the universe has made it so. And so long as we adopt this relative attitude toward right and wrong, we're revolting against the very laws of God himself.”

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

Rediscovering Lost Values http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/kingpapers/article/rediscovering_lost_values/, Sermon delivered at Detroit's Second Baptist Church (28 February 1954)
1950s
Context: We have adopted in the modern world a sort of a relativistic ethic... Most people can't stand up for their convictions, because the majority of people might not be doing it. See, everybody's not doing it, so it must be wrong. And since everybody is doing it, it must be right. So a sort of numerical interpretation of what's right. But I'm here to say to you this morning that some things are right and some things are wrong. Eternally so, absolutely so. It's wrong to hate. It always has been wrong and it always will be wrong. It's wrong in America, it's wrong in Germany, it's wrong in Russia, it's wrong in China. It was wrong in 2000 B. C., and it's wrong in 1954 A. D. It always has been wrong, and it always will be wrong. It's wrong to throw our lives away in riotous living. No matter if everybody in Detroit is doing it, it's wrong. It always will be wrong, and it always has been wrong. It's wrong in every age and it's wrong in every nation. Some things are right and some things are wrong, no matter if everybody is doing the contrary. Some things in this universe are absolute. The God of the universe has made it so. And so long as we adopt this relative attitude toward right and wrong, we're revolting against the very laws of God himself. [... ] That attitude is destroying the soul of our culture! It's destroying our nation! The thing that we need in the world today is a group of men and women who will stand up for right and to be opposed to wrong, wherever it is. A group of people who have come to see that some things are wrong, whether they're never caught up with. And some things are right, whether nobody sees you doing them or not.

“The main misfortune, the root of all evil to come, was loss of the confidence in the value of one's own opinion. People imagined that it was out of date of follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing in chorus, and live by other people's notions, notions that were crammed down everybody's throat.”

Borís Pasternak book Doctor Zhivago

As quoted in "Boris Pasternak" in I.F. Stone's Weekly (3 November 1958), § "Words Which Apply to Us As Well As Russia"; later in The Best of I.F. Stone (2006), p. 43
Doctor Zhivago (1957)

“I could not imagine a life that way…I wanted to be like everybody else. You marry a man who supports you – it never occurred to me I'd have to earn a living, and nor did I study to earn a living.”

Edith Windsor (1929–2017) American LGBT rights activist and a technology manager at IBM

On coming to the realization that she was a lesbian (as quoted in “Edith Windsor and Thea Spyer: 'A love affair that just kept on and on and on'” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/26/edith-windsor-thea-spyer-doma) (The Guardian; 2013 Jun 26)

“If we can't bring ourselves to say what's in our hearts when it truly matters, then we've already given up our freedom and with it the freedom of future generations, which is something that we've got no right to do. We didn't earn this freedom; it was handed to us on a plate by people who did earn it with their lives. We don't own it; we're custodians of it: it's not ours to give away.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"Appeasing Islam" (8 March 2008)
2008

“For a cap and bells our lives we pay,
Bubbles we earn with a whole soul's tasking:
'Tis heaven alone that is given away,
'Tis only God may be had for the asking.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

Prelude to Pt. I, st. 4
The Vision of Sir Launfal (1848)

“The notion that we "have a nature" far from threatening the concept of freedom, is absolutely essential to it.”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Introduction, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979).
Context: The notion that we "have a nature" far from threatening the concept of freedom, is absolutely essential to it. If we were genuinely plastic and indeterminate at birth, there could be no reason why society should not stamp us into any shape that might suit it. The reason people view suggestions about inborn tendencies with such indiscriminate horror seems to be that they think exclusively in one particular way in which the idea of such tendencies has been misused, namely, that where conservative theorists invoke them uncritically to resist reform. But liberal theorists who combat such resistance need them just as much, and indeed, usually more. The early architects of our current notion of freedom made human nature their cornerstone. Rousseau's trumpet call "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains," makes sense only as description of our innate constitution as something positive, already determined, and conflicting with what society does to us. Kant and Mill took similar positions. And Marx, though he officially dropped the notion of human nature and attacked the term, relied on the idea as much as anybody else for his crucial notion of Dehumanization.

“You can not buy health, you must earn it through healthy living.”

Joel Fuhrman (1953) Family Physician and author

From the homepage of his official website DrFuhrman.com https://web.archive.org/web/20170831072629/https://www.drfuhrman.com/ (August 2017).

“Everybody pities the weak; jealousy you have to earn.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger (1947) actor, businessman and politician of Austrian-American heritage

Variant: You have to remember something: Everybody pities the weak; jealousy you have to earn.

“The truth is that as soon as we are no longer obliged to earn our living, we no longer know what to do with our life and recklessly squander it.”

André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist

Source: Journals, 1889-1949

“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living.”

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Buckminster Fuller 171

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