“How come you don't work fourteen hours a day? Your great-great-grandparents did. How come you only work the eight-hour day? Four guys got hanged fighting for the eight-hour day for you.”

—  Studs Terkel

Source: Touch and Go: A Memoir

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "How come you don't work fourteen hours a day? Your great-great-grandparents did. How come you only work the eight-hour …" by Studs Terkel?
Studs Terkel photo
Studs Terkel 19
American author, historian and broadcaster 1912–2008

Related quotes

Robert Frost photo
Bill Haywood photo

“Eight hours of work, eight hours of play, eight hours of sleep - eight hours a day! (From the Haymarket era eight hour campaign)”

Bill Haywood (1869–1928) Labor organizer

(Haywood variation) Eight hours of work, eight hours of play, eight hours of sleep - and eight dollars a day!
Roughneck, The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood, Peter Carlson, 1983, page 147.

William Faulkner photo
Howard Dean photo
Alexander Alekhine photo

“I study chess eight hours a day, on principle.”

Alexander Alekhine (1892–1946) Russian / French chess player, chess writer, and chess theoretician

Attributed in: David Hooper, ‎Kenneth Whyld (1996) The Oxford companion to chess. p. 8.

Brigitte Lin photo

“I almost got no sleep, shooting eight hours in one film, followed by eight hours in another and eight hours in a third film. But whenever we were done at the end of the day, I never thought of packing up. I always couldn’t bear to go home.”

Brigitte Lin (1954) Taiwanese actress

As quoted in "Brigitte Lin, a timeless national treasure" in Taipei Times (15 May 2018) https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2018/05/15/2003693091

James Hudson Taylor photo

“Consider six or eight hours a day sacred to the Lord and His work, and let nothing hinder your giving this time (to language study and practice) till you can preach fluently and intelligibly.”

James Hudson Taylor (1832–1905) Missionary in China

(A.J. Broomhall. Hudson Taylor and China’s Open Century, Book Five: Refiner’s Fire. London: Hodder and Stoughton and Overseas Missionary Fellowship, 1985, 230).

Thomas Robert Malthus photo

“It is not the most pleasant employment to spend eight hours a day in a counting house.”

Book II, Chapter I, On the Progress of Wealth, Section IX, p. 403
Principles of Political Economy (Second Edition 1836)

Roberto Clemente photo

“We are on the field doing what we love to do. They have to work in the mill or other places eight hours a day, and work much harder than us and they pay their way in.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

Explaining to reporters why it's the players who should pay the fans, and not vice versa; at post-game press conference on Roberto Clemente Day, as quoted in "Roberto Clemente's a Man of 2 Lives ... and 2 Loves" https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=zbYcAAAAIBAJ&sjid=NWYEAAAAIBAJ&pg=2327%2C2876682 by the Associated Press, in The Sarasota Herald-Tribune (July 26, 1970)
Other, <big><big>1970s</big></big>, <big>1970</big>

Ernesto Che Guevara photo

“While a person dies every day during the eight or more hours in which he or she functions as a commodity, individuals come to life afterward in their spiritual creations.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)
Context: While a person dies every day during the eight or more hours in which he or she functions as a commodity, individuals come to life afterward in their spiritual creations. But this remedy bears the germs of the same sickness: that of a solitary being seeking harmony with the world.

Related topics