“The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse.”
Life Without Principle (1863)
Context: The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself.
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Henry David Thoreau 385
1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitio… 1817–1862Related quotes
TED: "How to run a company with (almost) no rules" https://www.ted.com/talks/ricardo_semler_how_to_run_a_company_with_almost_no_rules/ (October 2014)

you ask. "Well, I'll get more," he says. Just as at cricket, you get more runs. There's no use in the runs, but to get more of them than other people is the game. So all that great foul city of London there, — rattling, growling, smoking, stinking, — a ghastly heap of fermenting brickwork, pouring out poison at every pore, — you fancy it is a city of work? Not a street of it! It is a great city of play; very nasty play and very hard play, but still play.
The Crown of Wild Olive, lecture I: Work, sections 23-24 (1866)

Source: 1980s–1990s, Barbarians inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays (1999)

Letter to Cassandra (1811-04-18) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“If you don't want to work you have to work to earn enough money so that you won't have to work.”
"More About People"
Many Long Years Ago (1945)
Source: Hard Lines

the option to raise children, or to not take a hazardous job
Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 11.

From interview with Komal Nahta