“Your foreman or supervisor gives you more or-else orders in a week than the police do in a decade.”

— Bob Black

The Libertarian as Conservative (1984)
Context: Without even entering into the question of the world economy’s ultimate dictation within narrow limits of everybody’s productive activity, it’s apparent that the source of the greatest direct duress experienced by the ordinary adult is not the state but rather the business that employs him. Your foreman or supervisor gives you more or-else orders in a week than the police do in a decade.

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Bob Black 63

American anarchist 1951

Philip Mulryne (1978) Northern Irish footballer

Source: Professional Footballer to Catholic Priest: The Story of Fr. Philip Mulryne https://www.tlcm.com.mt/2017/07/27/professional-footballer-to-catholic-priest-the-story-of-fr-philip-mulryne/ (July 2017)

“The art of compromise centers on the willingness to give up something in order to get something else in return. Successful artists get more than they give up.”

Howard Raiffa (1924–2016) American academic

Part III, Chapter 10, AMPO Versus City, p. 142.
The Art and Science of Negotiation (1982)

“There are decades when weeks happen, and weeks when decades happen.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

or: There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.
Always without citation but supposedly describing the Russian Revolution; earliest quotes online dating ~2005-2006 "Exposing the Big Lie: Interview with George Galloway by Eric Ruder" http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Europe/ExposingBigLie_GGalloway.html
"Johann Hari: Why won't Israel just exchange prisoners? This is such a wacky, left-wing ideal that it was pursued by Ariel Sharon two years ago" http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-why-wont-israel-just-exchange-prisoners-6094888.html, 19 July 2006; popularized describing the Arab Spring. May be loosely based on a similar phrasing by Karl Marx:
How soon the English workers will throw off what seems to be a bourgeois contagion remains to be seen. So far as the main theses in your book [Condition of the Working Class in England] are concerned, by the by, they have been corroborated down to the very last detail by developments subsequent to 1844. For I have again been comparing the book with the notes I made on the ensuing period. Only your small-minded German philistine who measures world history by the ell and by what he happens to think are ‘interesting news items’, could regard 20 years as more than a day where major developments of this kind are concerned, though these may be again succeeded by days into which 20 years are compressed.
Letter, Marx to Engels, 9 April 1863 in Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence 1965, 140 http://marxists.catbull.com/archive/marx/works/1863/letters/63_04_09.htm
Misattributed

“This cricket is like a burger, you can have it once a week but for a whole meal, you need to return to Test cricket. More than once a week, and it will give you a tummy ache.”

Navjot Singh Sidhu (1963) Indian cricketer and politician

On Twenty20 cricket, in "Twenty20 game is 'underwear' cricket: Sidhu" in Daily News and Analysis (17 July 2006).

“There is no point in prioritizing doing your job when your organization faces being defunded in less than three months’ time if you don’t do something else: you do what’s necessary in order to ensure your organization survives, then you get back to work.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

This is how the iron law of bureaucracy installs itself at the heart of an institution. Most of the activities of any bureaucracy are devoted not to the organization’s ostensible goals, but to ensuring that the organization survives: because if they aren’t, the bureaucracy has a life expectancy measured in days before some idiot decision maker decides that if it’s no use to them they can make political hay by destroying it. It’s no consolation that some time later someone will realize that an organization was needed to carry out the original organization’s task, so a replacement is created: you still lost your job and the task went undone. The only sure way forward is to build an agency that looks to its own survival before it looks to its mission statement. Just another example of evolution in action.
Source: The Laundry Files, The Annihilation Score (2015), Chapter 16, “Democracy in Action” (pp. 311-312)

“I'm only giving orders because I'm more efficient and smarter than you are.”

Jack Vance book The Five Gold Bands

Source: The Five Gold Bands (1950), Chapter 5 (p. 57)

“What are you Barrons?”
“The one who will never let you die, and that’s more, Ms Lane, than anyone in your life has been able to say to you. More than anyone else can do”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Bloodfever

“And you can't find "love" because in order to find "love" you have to be capable of dishing it out. In order to be capable of giving "love", your own life has to be in harmony with everything else, and that's not attainable…”

Jacque Fresco (1916–2017) American futurist and self-described social engineer

“Give the park police more ammo.”

Newt Gingrich (1943) Professor, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives

[2011-03-31, Poor and Homeless in the Sunshine State: Down and Out in Theme Park Nation, James D., Wright, Amy M., Donley, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswich, 9781412842211, 2010043864, 290, http://books.google.com/books?id=NiRKy5I5xhEC&pg=PA290]
asked what should be done about homelessness
2010s

“God is a foreman with certain definite views
Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.”

Seamus Heaney book Death of a Naturalist

"Docker", line 10, from Death of a Naturalist.
Poetry Quotes, Death of a Naturalist

“Your foreman or supervisor gives you more or-else orders in a week than the police do in a decade.”

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Bob Black 63

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