John Mortimer (1923–2009) English barrister, dramatist, screenwriter and author
Source: Where There's a Will: Thoughts on the Good Life (2003), Ch. 15 : Interesting Times
John Mortimer (1923–2009) English barrister, dramatist, screenwriter and author
Source: Where There's a Will: Thoughts on the Good Life (2003), Ch. 15 : Interesting Times
Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant
Today they tend to ask, “Whom do you work for?”
Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), p. 4
R. Edward Freeman (1951) American academic
Source: Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach, 2007, p. 5
Philip K. Dick book The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Source: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Chapter 11 (p. 183)
Samuel Bowles (1939) American economist
Source: Understanding Capitalism: Competition, Command, and Change, 2005, p. 85
Philippe Kahn (1952) Entrepreneur, camera phone creator
San Jose Mercury News May 6th 2009, regarding the Sale of Borland to Micro Focus http://www.mercurynews.com/centralcoast/ci_12309355.
W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist
The Naked Communist (1958)
Chester Barnard (1886–1961) American businessman
Source: Organization and Management: Selected Papers (1948), p. 15
Chris Argyris (1923–2013) American business theorist/Professor Emeritus/Harvard Business School/Thought Leader at Monitor Group
Chris Argyris "Teaching smart people how to learn" in: Peter F. Drucker (1998) Harvard Business Review on Knowledge Management. p. 82
Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant
Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 1, p. 284
Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician
What Really Divides Us https://web.archive.org/web/20120127094927/http://www.ronpaularchive.com/2002/12/what-really-divides-us/ (23 December 2002). <br class="br">2000s, 2001-2005
Ann E. Dunwoody (1953) U.S. Army, first four-star general in U.S. military history
Source: A Higher Standard (2015), p. 200
Ed Bradley (1941–2006) News correspondent
[Steven Pressman, w:Steven Pressman, Outrageous Betrayal: The Dark Journey of Werner Erhard from est to Exile, St. Martin's Press, 1993, New York, 253-258, 0-312-09296-2, OCLC 27897209 http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/27897209] <br class="br">About
Tom Peters book In Search of Excellence
Source: In Search of Excellence (1982), p. i.
Gregory Balestrero (1947) American industrial engineer
NACE International (1990). Materials Performance. p. 104.
1990s
Matt Taibbi (1970) author and journalist
"Goodbye, and Good Riddance, to Centrism" Rolling Stone, June 13, 2017 http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-goodbye-and-good-riddance-to-centrism-w487628
Gregory Balestrero (1947) American industrial engineer
Public power (1990) Volume 48. American Public Power Association. p. 9
1990s
Alan Ryan (1940) British philosopher
Justice (1993)
Charles Wheelan (1966) American politician
Introduction to Public Policy (2011), Ch. 8 : The Role of Government
Bob Black book The Abolition of Work
The Abolition of Work (1985)
Context: I am not playing definitional games with anybody. When I say I want to abolish work, I mean just what I say, but I want to say what I mean by defining my terms in non-idiosyncratic ways. My minimun definition of work is forced labor, that is, compulsory production. Both elements are essential. Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick. (The carrot is just the stick by other means.) But not all creation is work. Work is never done for its own sake, it's done on account of some product or output that the worker (or, more often, somebody else) gets out of it. This is what work necessarily is. To define it is to despise it. But work is usually even worse than its definition decrees. The dynamic of domination intrinsic to work tends over time toward elaboration. In advanced work-riddled societies, including all industrial societies whether capitalist or "communist," work invariably acquires other attributes which accentuate its obnoxiousness.
Usually—and this is even more true in "communist" than capitalist countries, where the state is almost the only employer and everyone is an employee — work is employment, i. e., wage-labor, which means selling yourself on the installment plan. Thus 95% of Americans who work, work for somebody (or something) else. In the USSR or Cuba or Yugoslavia or Nicaragua or any other alternative model which might be adduced, the corresponding figure approaches 100%. Only the embattled Third World peasant bastions — Mexico, India, Brazil, Turkey — temporarily shelter significant concentrations of agriculturists who perpetuate the traditional arrangement of most laborers in the last several millennia, the payment of taxes (ransom) to the state or rent to parasitic landlords in return for being otherwise left alone. Even this raw deal is beginning to look good. All industrial (and office) workers are employees and under the sort of surveillance which ensures servility.
Ashoka (-304–-232 BC) Indian emperor of the Maurya Dynasty
Edicts of Ashoka (c. 257 BC)
Context: There is no gift like the gift of the Dhamma, (no acquaintance like) acquaintance with Dhamma, (no distribution like) distribution of Dhamma, and (no kinship like) kinship through Dhamma. And it consists of this: proper behavior towards servants and employees, respect for mother and father, generosity to friends, companions, relations, Brahmans and ascetics, and not killing living beings. Therefore a father, a son, a brother, a master, a friend, a companion or a neighbor should say: "This is good, this should be done." One benefits in this world and gains great merit in the next by giving the gift of the Dhamma.
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) writer, activist
"Women and the Myth of Consumerism," Ramparts (1969)
Context: There is a persistent myth that a wife has control over her husband’s money because she gets to spend it. Actually, she does not have much more financial authority than the employee of a corporation who is delegated to buy office furniture or supplies. The husband, especially if he is rich, may allow his wife wide latitude in spending — he may reason that since she has to work in the home she is entitled to furnish it to her taste, or he may simply not want to bother with domestic details — but he retains the ultimate veto power. If he doesn’t like the way his wife handles his money, she will hear about it.
Henry George (1839–1897) American economist
Source: Protection or Free Trade? (1886), Ch. 2
Context: The needs of labor require more than kind words, and are not to be satisfied by such soft phrases as we address to a horse when we want to catch him that we may put a bit in his mouth and a saddle on his back. Let me ask those who are disposed to regard protection as favorable to the aspirations of labor, to consider whether it can be true that what labor needs is to be protected?
To admit that labor needs protection is to acknowledge its inferiority; it is to acquiesce in an assumption that degrades the workman to the position of a dependent, and leads logically to the claim that the employee is bound to vote in the interest of the employer who provides him with work.
There is something in the very word "protection" that ought to make workingmen cautious of accepting anything presented to them under it. The protection of the masses has in all times been the pretense of tyranny — the plea of monarchy, of aristocracy, of special privilege of every kind. The slave owners justified slavery as protecting the slaves.
Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States
1930s, Fireside Chat in the night before signing the Fair Labor Standards (1938)
Context: Do not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000 a day, who has been turning his employees over to the Government relief rolls in order to preserve his company's undistributed reserves, tell you – using his stockholders’ money to pay the postage for his personal opinions — tell you that a wage of $11.00 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry. Fortunately for business as a whole, and therefore for the Nation, that type of executive is a rarity with whom most business executives heartily disagree.
Ketanji Brown Jackson (1970) United States District Judge
Reference note: See The Federalist No. 51 (James Madison); The Federalist No. 69 (Alexander Hamilton); 1 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America 115–18...
Committee on the Judiary, United States House of Representatives, Plaintiff, v. Donald F. McGahn II, Defendant. (Nov 25, 2019)
Milton Friedman book Free to Choose
Source: Free to Choose (1980), Ch. 8 "Who Protects the Workers?", p. 246
Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer
“Economic Myths and Public Opinion” https://miltonfriedman.hoover.org/friedman_images/Collections/2016c21/AmSpectator_01_1976.pdf, The Alternative: An American Spectator, vol. 9, no. 4, (January 1976) pp. 5-9
Charles Stross The Laundry Files
Source: The Laundry Files, The Fuller Memorandum (2010), Chapter 2, “Pointing the Finger” (p. 32)
Clinton Edgar Woods (1863) American engineer
In clean-cut form, his duties and relations to other men of the organization are laid down once and for all, and responsibility rests on the right man. Failure so to specify responsibilities inevitably means confusion all down the line.
Source: Industrial organization (1914), p. 24-25
“How many Microsoft employees does it take to screw in a light bulb?”
Guy Kawasaki (1954) American businessman and author
The answer to that is none because Bill Gates has declared darkness the new standard. <br class="br"> Speech at Stanford University 2 March 2011 http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2669
“How many Macintosh division employees does it take to screw in a light bulb?”
Guy Kawasaki (1954) American businessman and author
The answer is one. The Macintosh division employee holds up the light bulb and expects the universe to revolve around it. <br class="br"> Speech at Stanford University 2 March 2011 http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2669
André Gorz (1923–2007) austrian philosopher
p. 66 https://books.google.com/books?id=WbpvDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA66 <br class="br">Critique of Economic Reason, 1988
Dril Twitter user
[ Link to tweet https://twitter.com/dril/status/1288582330261467136] <br class="br">Tweets by year, 2020
Kendrick Lamar (1987) American rapper, songwriter and record producer from California
Source: Song lyrics, DAMN. (2017), XXX
Greg McKeown (author) book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
Popular Quotes, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, Journal Articles
Liu Chuanzhi (1944) Chinese businessman
Source: The Scientist Who Could http://edition.cnn.com/ASIANOW/asiaweek/97/0613/biz2.html in Asiaweek (2000)
John Taylor Gatto (1935–2018) American teacher, book author
Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling (2008)
Source: Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling, New Society Publishers (2013) p. xxii
Leopold III of Belgium (1901–1983) King of Belgians
The visit of King Albert I to the Belgian Congo in 1928. Between propaganda and reality. https://www.congoforum.be/Upldocs/Het_bezoek_van_koning_Albert_I_aan_Belgi.compressed.pdf In July 1933, in a noted speech to the Senate, Leopold made a plea for the development of paysannat or indigenous agriculture in then Belgian Congo.