Quotes about employment
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“The worker and the employer are now brothers who cannot be separated one from the other. The days of exploitation of the whole for the benefit of the individual have gone. The worker and the employer are now brothers, working side by side in harmony and solidarity for the people and the immortal Iraqi Republic.”

Abd al-Karim Qasim (1914–1963) Prime Minister of Iraq

Speech delivered in the gardens of the Shaab Hall (May 1, 1959).
Principles of the 14th July Revolution (1959)

People

“Scientific investigation is rapidly putting at our disposal vast amounts of knowledge concerning materials and forces, which it is the business of the engineer to utilize for the benefit of the community. Well-designed plants and efficiency labor-saving devices, to be seen on every hand, bear testimony that he is doing at least a portion of his work well. When, however, it comes to the operation of these plants and the utilization of these labor-saving devices, the lack of co-operation between employer and employee, and the inefficient utilization of labor, very much impair their efficiency. The increase of this efficiency is essentially the problem of the manager, and the amount to which it can be increased by proper study is, in most cases, so great as to be almost incredible.”

Henry Gantt (1861–1919) American engineer

Source: Work, Wages, and Profits: Their Influence on the Cost of Living. 1910, p. 13-14.

Communication, Business, Knowledge, Problem

“It is impossible to overstate the significance of this. This is the last citadel for women in our Army. The bias towards officers with an arms corps affiliation in choosing senior leaders has some justification. Close combat is the core business of the Army. But women are already ‘in combat’ due to the changing character of war. Formal recognition of this removes the last defence of those who are resistant to the widest employment of women in the Army, and by extension their promotion to the most senior ranks. It is quite conceivable now that a woman will serve as the Chief of the Army in light of this decision.”

David Morrison (1956) Australian army general

Address at the International Women's Day Conference (2013)

Women, War, Business, Decision

“I do not demand equal pay for any women save those who do equal work in value. Scorn to be coddled by your employers; make them understand that you are in their service as workers, not as women.”

Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) American women's rights activist

The Revolution, Women's Suffrage Newspaper (8 October 1868)

Women, Understanding

“When I was…. in the surroundings of pictures and things of art… I then had a violent passion for them… And I do not repent it, for even now, far from that land, I am often homesick for the land of pictures. Now for more than five years already, I do not know exactly how long, I'm more or less without employment, wandering here and there… But you will ask what is your definite aim? That aim becomes more definite, will stand out slowly and surely, as the rough draft becomes a sketch and the sketch becomes a picture…. my only anxiety is: how can I be of use in the world, cannot I serve some purpose and be of any good, how can I learn more and study profoundly certain subjects?”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

In his letter to brother Theo, from Cuesmes, Belgium July 1880; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 133) p. 19 1880s, 1880

World, Art, Study, Learning

“Operation Flood has three major achievements to its credit: making dairying India’s largest self-sustainable rural employment program; bringing India self-sufficiency in milk production; trebling the nation’s milk production within a span of two and half decades to make India the world’s largest milk producer.”

Verghese Kurien (1921–2012) Indian founder of dairy-cooperative Amul

in p. 83
Quote, Our Leaders

World

“Logic, like lyrical poetry, is no employment for the middle-aged”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

Source: Essays In Biography (1933), F. P. Ramsey, p. 296
Originally published in The Economic Journal, March 1930. and The New Statesman and Nation, October 3, 1931

Age

“Postmodern descriptions of prostituted women as sex workers promotes an acceptance of conditions that in any other employment context would be correctly described as sexual harassment, sexual exploitation, or rape. Women’s experiences of violence and their psychological response to it cannot be theorized away.”

Melissa Farley (1942) American psychologist

Prostitution, Trafficking, and Cultural Amnesia (2006)

Women, Sex

“I am convinced that the majority of the religious hierarchy today deplores the hardship inflicted on our people. I am referring not only to the martyrs but of the families who have been dispersed and terrified, who have no resources, and to the four million unemployed who are suffering from the economic chaos of a country which only a year earlier was giving employment to a million foreigners. Those who have chosen to serve God must feel profoundly sad at seeing ridicule poured on the most sacred principles of our religion.”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

Page 167
Publications, The Shah's Story (1980), On Islam and the Islamic Revolution

God, People, Sadness, Family

“There is great dignity in work – and in America, if you want to provide for your family, you should be able to find a full-time job that pays a fair wage. The federal jobs guarantee is an idea that demands to be taken seriously. Creating an employment guarantee would give all Americans a shot at a day’s work and, by introducing competition into the labor market, raise wages and improve benefits for all workers.”

Cory Booker (1969) 35th Class 2 senator for New Jersey in U.S. Congress

In [Salant, Jonathan D., 11 ways Cory Booker is wooing progressives as he eyes a run for president in 2020, https://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2018/08/11_ways_booker_is_wooing_progressives_in_advance_of_1.html, nj.com, 21 August 2018, August 19, 2018]
2018

Family, Idea, Time

“I have… instituted systematic, voluntary measures of cooperation with the business institutions and with State and municipal authorities to make certain that fundamental businesses of the country shall continue as usual, that wages and therefore consuming power shall not be reduced, and that a special effort shall be made to expand construction work in order to assist in equalizing other deficits in employment… I am convinced that through these measures we have reestablished confidence. Wages should remain stable. A very large degree of industrial unemployment and suffering which would otherwise have occurred has been prevented. Agricultural prices have reflected the returning confidence. The measures taken must be vigorously pursued until normal conditions are restored.”

Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) 31st President of the United States of America

State of the Union Address (3 December 1929)

Confidence, Business, Effort, Suffering

“Should we worry about social media sites sharing everything they know about us with third-party commercial interests? Of course, no one wants to be pestered by targeted advertising. More sinister, however, is the prospect of health insurance companies learning whether you had been Googling research on specific illnesses or prospective employers prying into your personal social history by analyzing your data trail on the Web to spot potential quirks, idiosyncrasies, or even possible antisocial behavior.”

Jeremy Rifkin (1945) American economist

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (2014)

Health, Behavior, History, Learning

“The Secure Fence Act is part of our efforts to reform our immigration system. We have more to do. Meaningful immigration reforms means that we must enforce our immigration laws in the United States. It is against the law to hire someone who is here illegally. We fully understand that most businesses want to obey that law, but they cannot verify the legal status of their employees because of widespread document fraud. So we're creating a better system for verifying documents and work eligibility, and in the meantime, holding people to account for breaking the law. We must reduce pressure on our border by creating a temporary worker plan. Willing workers ought to be matched with willing employers to do jobs Americans are not doing for a temporary -- on a temporary basis.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2004, Signing of Secure Fence Act of 2006

People, Law, Understanding, Business

“The great majority of politicians and other interested persons tend to…. concentrate on…. measures such as education and training of labour and investment in modern efficient capital equipment…. These reforms are of extreme importance but they are concerned basically with raising the output per head of those who are in employment rather than about the number of heads that will find suitable employment.”

James Meade (1907–1995) British economist

James Meade, Full Employment Regained? An Agathotopian Dream, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, (1995), p. xvii; As cited in: O'higgins, Niall. "The challenge of youth unemployment." International Social Security Review 50.4 (1997): p. 89

Education, Personality, Training

“Better than big business is clean business.
To an honest man the most satisfactory reflection after he has amassed his dollars is not that they are many but that they are all clean.
What constitutes clean business? The answer is obvious enough, but the obvious needs restating every once in a while.
"A clean profit is one that has also made a profit for the other fellow."
This is fundamental moral axiom in business. Any gain that arises from another's loss is dirty.
Any business whose prosperity depends upon damage to any other business is a menace to the general welfare.
That is why gambling, direct or indirect, is criminal, why lotteries are prohibited by law, and why even gambling slot-machine devices are not tolerated in civilized countries. When a farmer sells a housekeeper a barrel of apples, when a milkman sells her a quart of milk, or the butcher a pound of steak, or the dry-goods man a yard of muslin, the housekeeper is benefited quite as much as those who get her money.
That is the type of honest, clean business, the kind that helps everybody and hurts nobody. Of course as business becomes more complicated it grows more difficult to tell so clearly whether both sides are equally prospered. No principle is automatic. It requires sense, judgment, and conscience to keep clean; but it can be done, nevertheless, if one is determined to maintain his self-respect. A man that makes a habit, every deal he goes into, of asking himself, "What is there in it for the other fellow?" and who refuses to enter into any transaction where his own gain will mean disaster to some one else, cannot go for wrong.
And no matter how many memorial churches he builds, nor how much he gives to charity, or how many monuments he erects in his native town, any man who has made his money by ruining other people is not entitled to be called decent. A factory where many workmen are given employment, paid living wages, and where health and life are conserved, is doing more real good in the world than ten eleemosynary institutions.
The only really charitable dollar is the clean dollar. And the nasty dollar, wrung from wronged workmen or gotten by unfair methods from competitors, is never nastier than when it pretends to serve the Lord by being given to the poor, to education, or to religion. In the long run all such dollars tend to corrupt and disrupt society.
Of all vile money, that which is the most unspeakably vile is the money spent for war; for war is conceived by the blundering ignorance and selfishness of rulers, is fanned to flame by the very lowest passions of humanity, and prostitutes the highest ideal of men; zeal for the common good; to the business of killing human beings and destroying the results of their collective work.”

Frank Crane (1861–1928) American Presbyterian minister

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), Clean Business

Life, Men, Money, War

“Affirmative action has to be combined with a broader program of social reform that would emphasize social rights: the right to employment, the right to education, the right to good health. Over the years, black leaders have been slow to recognize the need for a very, very progressive agenda. Anytime someone has talked about putting America back to work, blacks should have said yes, but they didn't. They were so preoccupied with affirmative action that they didn't provide the kind of leadership that would help some of the other progressive folks. Only now are black leaders beginning to realize the impact of economic issues.”

William Julius Wilson (1935) American sociologist

Interview with Mother Jones.

Health, Education, Help

“We in India, as a result of our planned economic development, not central planning, but mixed planning, mixed economy, we have experimented with, we have moved to a stage of partial maturity of the economy, when we needed new forms of management, new forms of, expression of the spirit of enterprise, so that the economy can move forward. The compulsion to liberalisation and globalisation arose from this. This is why we say that India's liberalisation is an irreversible process…. and, in a vast country, with millions of people and poverty, rampant, we cannot liberalise recklessly, in such a way that the balance of the society is upset and while some sections would flourish, make profits, the rest of the people would be left without employment and be helpless. Therefore, we have to have a balanced approach to liberalisation and also to globalisation.”

K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) 9th Vice President and the 10th President of India

Shri K. R. Narayanan President of India in Conversation with N. Ram on Doordarshan and All India Radio

People, Way, Country

“The theory of economic shock therapy relies in part on the roleof expectations on feeding an inflationary process. Reining in inflation requires not only changing monetary policy but also changing the behavior of consumers, employers and workers. The role of a sudden, jarring policy shift is that it quickly alters expectations, signaling to the public that the rules of the game have changed dramatically - prices will not keep rising, nor will wages.”

Naomi Klein (1970) Canadian author and activist

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007)

Behavior, Game, Change, Parting

“In New Directions for Organization Theory, Jeffrey Pfeffer offers a comprehensive analysis and overview of the field of organization theory and its research literature. This work traces the evolution of organization studies, particularly its more recent history, and highlights the principle concepts and controversies characterizing the study of organizations. Pfeffer argues that the world of organizations has changed in several important ways, including the increasing externalization of employment and the growing use of contingent workers; the changing size distribution of organizations, with a larger proportion of smaller organizations; the increasing influence of external capital markets on organizational decision-making and a concomitant decrease in managerial autonomy; and increasing salary inequality within organizations in the US compared both to the past and to other industrialized nations. These changes and their public policy implications make it especially important to understand organizations as social entities. But Pfeffer questions whether the research literature of organization studies has either addressed these changes and their causes or made much of a contribution to the discussion of public policy…”

Jeffrey Pfeffer (1946) American academic

Book abstract.
New Directions for Organization Theory, 1997

World, Way, History, Literature

“We have at hand these great resources and great opportunities. They can not be utilized to their fullest extent without careful organization and methodical purpose. Our youth need instruction in how to play as much as they do in how to work. There are those who are engaged in our industries who need an opportunity for outdoor life and recreation no less than they need opportunity of employment. Side by side with the industrial plant should be the gymnasium and the athletic field. Along with the learning of a trade by which a livelihood is to be earned should go the learning of how to participate in the activities of recreation, by which life is made not only more enjoyable, but more rounded out and complete. The country needs instruction in order that we may better secure these results.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Democracy of Sports (1924)

Life, Youth, Learning, Country

“I have to inform the House that the present situation is so critical that the Government are compelled to seek special powers from the House by a Bill to be passed through all its stages in both Houses of Parliament to-day. The situation is grave. … The Government are convinced that now is the time when we must mobilise to the full the whole resources of this country. We must throw all our weight into the struggle. Every private interest must give way to the urgent needs of the community. We cannot know what the next few weeks or even days may bring forth, but whatever may come we shall meet it as the British people in the past have met dangers and overcome them. But it is necessary that the Government should be given complete control over persons and property, not just some persons of some particular class of the community, but of all persons, rich and poor, employer and workman, man or woman, and all property.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1940/may/22/business-of-the-house-emergency#S5CV0361P0_19400522_HOC_158 in the House of Commons (22 May 1940) introducing the Emergency Powers Act 1940. War Cabinet

People, Way, Communication, Time

“I hope your Excellency will not think this application results from a lazy habit, or a desire to free myself from business. Far from it. I am never more happy than when I am honorably or usefully employed. If your Excellency thinks I can promote the service as much in this employment as in any other, I shall cheerfully execute the business, without the least murmur.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (July 1776)

Hope, Business, Thinking, Happiness

“Let us begin with the simplest illustration possible: let us, emulating Bastiat, choose a broken pane of glass.A young hoodlum, say, heaves a brick through the window of a baker’s shop. The shopkeeper runs out furious, but the boy is gone. A crowd gathers, and begins to stare with quiet satisfaction at the gaping hole in the window and the shattered glass over the bread and pies. After a while the crowd feels the need for philosophic reflection. And several of its members are almost certain to remind each other or the baker that, after all, the misfortune has its bright side. It will make business for some glazier. As they begin to think of this they elaborate upon it. How much does a new plate glass window cost? Fifty dollars? That will be quite a sum. After all, if windows were never broken, what would happen to the glass business? Then, of course, the thing is endless. The glazier will have $50 more to spend with other merchants, and these in turn will have $50 more to spend with still other merchants, and so ad infinitum. The smashed window will go on providing money and employment in ever-widening circles. The logical conclusion from all this would be, if the crowd drew it, that the little hoodlum who threw the brick, far from being a public menace, was a public benefactor.Now let us take another look. The crowd is at least right in its first conclusion. This little act of vandalism will in the first instance mean more business for some glazier. The glazier will be no more unhappy to learn of the incident than an undertaker to learn of a death. But the shopkeeper will be out $50 that he was planning to spend for a new suit. Because he has had to replace a window, he will have to go without the suit (or some equivalent need or luxury). Instead of having a window and $50 he now has merely a window. Or, as he was planning to buy the suit that very afternoon, instead of having both a window and a suit he must be content with the window and no suit. If we think of him as a part of the community, the community has lost a new suit that might otherwise have come into being, and is just that much poorer.The glazier’s gain of business, in short, is merely the tailor’s loss of business. No new “employment” has been added. The people in the crowd were thinking only of two parties to the transaction, the baker and the glazier. They had forgotten the potential third party involved, the tailor. They forgot him precisely because he will not now enter the scene. They will see the new window in the next day or two. They will never see the extra suit, precisely because it will never be made. They see only what is immediately visible to the eye.”

Henry Hazlitt book Economics in One Lesson

Economics in One Lesson (1946), The Broken Window (ch. 2)

Death, Money, People, Feeling

“… in economic political discussions there is a nearly infinite number of specific questions that may be asked. Besides the ones mentioned in section 3 consider for instance these: "Should we build a road between points A and B in the country?", "Should we promote investments that will give employment to many people, or should we on the contrary promote such investment which will save labour?"… "Should we put more emphasis on things that have up to now not been included in the statistical concept of the gross national product? For instance, should we try to avoid air-pollution and all the kinds of intoxications that may be caused by refuse and waste (a problem that must be studied in its totality as a problem of circulation of matter in society, much in the same way as we study interindustry relations in an input-output table)?“, “Should we assess economic value to an undisturbed nature?””

Ragnar Frisch (1895–1973) Norwegian economist

etc.
Source: 1970s and later, From Utopian Theory to Practical Applications, 1970, p. 29

People, Way, Question, Nature

“It saddens me to see the entrepreneurial world in Brazil, because it's a misfortune to be a boss in our country, with so many labor laws. […] Between a man and a young woman, what will the entrepreneur think? 'Damn, this woman's got a ring on her finger, she'll be pregnant soon, she'll be on maternity leave for six months…' […] Who's going to pay the bill? The employer. In the end it's deducted from social security but he says "the work rhythm is broken. And when she returns, she'll take a month-long vacation. In the end, she works five months in one year." […] I'm a liberal. If I want to hire you at my company paying you R$ 2,000.00 a month and Ms. Mary paying her R$ 1,500.00, and if Ms. Mary doesn't want to earn that amount, she must look for another job! If you think you also are not earning so much, look for another job. It is I who am paying you; I am the boss.”

Jair Bolsonaro (1955) Brazilian president elect

In an interview with Zero Hora newspaper https://gauchazh.clicrbs.com.br/politica/noticia/2014/12/bolsonaro-diz-que-nao-teme-processos-e-faz-nova-ofensa-nao-merece-ser-estuprada-porque-e-muito-feia-cjkf8rj3x00cc01pi3kz6nu2e.html on 10 December 2014. Brazil presidential candidate Bolsonaro's most controversial quotes https://www.yahoo.com/news/brazil-presidential-candidate-bolsonaros-most-controversial-quotes-012652084.html. Yahoo!, 29 September 2018.

World, Law, Thinking, Maternity

“To live in perpetual employment, is to travel rapidly through life. Tranquility lengthens our existence.”

Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, marquise de Lambert (1647–1733) writer from France

Source: An Essay on Old Age, 1732, p. 136

Life, Travel

“I think the movement contributed to this nation a sense of universal freedom. Precisely because women saw our movement in the sixties, stimulated them to want their rights. The fact that students saw the movement of the sixties created a student movement in this country. The fact that the people were against the war in Vietnam, saw us go into the street and win, made it possible for them to have the courage to go into the street and win, and the lesson that I would like to see from this is, that we must now find a way to deal with the problem of full employment, and as surely as we were able to bring about the Civil Rights Act, the voter rights act--the Voting Rights Act, I mean the education act, and the housing act, so is it possible for all of us now to combine our forces in a coalition, including Catholic, Protestant, Jew and labor and blacks and Puerto Ricans and Mexican-Americans and all other minorities, to bring about the one thing that will bring peace internally to the United States. And that is that any man who wants a job, or any woman who wants a job, shall not be left unemployed.”

Bayard Rustin (1912–1987) American civil rights activist and gay rights activist

Eyes on the Prize interview http://digital.wustl.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=eop;cc=eop;rgn=main;view=text;idno=rus0015.0145.091, Interview with Bayard Rustin, conducted by Blackside, Inc. in 1979, for Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years (1954-1965). Washington University Libraries, Film and Media Archive, Henry Hampton Collection. (1979)

Women, War, People, Education

“The federal government has no right to treat all Americans as criminals by spying on their relationship with their doctors, employers, or bankers.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Subcommittee on Government Management, Information and Technology http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2000/ss051800.htm (May 18, 2000). 2000s, 2001-2005

“I find it amazing now that my first economics class, taught by Alan Sweezy, used John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory of Income and Employment as the textbook. Although this book is one of the most influential works of the twentieth century, it makes a really lousy textbook. Moreover, since I now regard Keynes’s analysis as seriously flawed, it is surprising that I enjoyed the course so much. As a student, I appreciated the simple way that the Keynesian model explained the workings and failings of the overall economy. Especially appealing were the clever policy remedies, such as increased government spending and tax cuts, that Keynes recommended to combat unemployment. Too bad that I discovered later that the model was theoretically and empirically deficient!”

Robert Barro (1944) American classical macroeconomist

Source: Nothing Is Sacred (2002), p. xiii

Books, Way

“That we are overdone with banking institutions which have banished the precious metals and substituted a more fluctuating and unsafe medium, that these have withdrawn capital from useful improvements and employments to nourish idleness, that the wars of the world have swollen our commerce beyond the wholesome limits of exchanging our own productions for our own wants, and that, for the emolument of a small proportion of our society who prefer these demoralizing pursuits to labors useful to the whole, the peace of the whole is endangered and all our present difficulties produced, are evils more easily to be deplored than remedied.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Abbe Salimankis (1810) ME 12:379 The Writings of Thomas Jefferson "Memorial Edition" (20 Vols., 1903-04) edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol. 12, p. 379; also quoted at "Thomas Jefferson on Politics & Government: Money & Banking" at University of Virginia http://etext.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jeff1325.htm Posthumous publications, On financial matters

War, World, Peace, Evil

“I sold electric light bulbs to janitors, candy to drug stores, and Stoddard's Lectures from door to door. I had decided I was a total failure, when I saw an advertisement which indicated that somebody wanted an expert accountant. Not knowing anything about its I applied for the job and got it.
I am convinced that what are commonly known as "the breaks," good or bad, have fully as much to do with one's success or failure as ability. The break I got in this instance lay in the fact that my employer knew even less about the duties of an expert accountant than I did.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) American writer

How I Wrote the Tarzan Books (1929)

Failure, Light, Success

“The swift victory of the railway over the waterway resulted from organizational as well as technological innovation. Technology made possible fast, all-weather transportation; but safe, regular, reliable movement of goods and passengers, as well as the continuing maintenance and repair of locomotives, rolling stock, and track, roadbed, stations, roundhouses and other equipment, required the creation of a sizable administrative organization. It meant the employment of an administrative command of middle and top executives to monitor, evaluate, and coordinate the work of managers responsible for the day-to-day operations. It meant, too, the formulation of brand new types of internal administrative procedures and accounting and statistical controls. Hence, the operational requirements of the railroads demanded the creation of the first administrative hierarchies in American business.”

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. (1918–2007) American historian

Source: The Visible Hand (1977), p. 87.

Business, Victory, Weather

“The manufacturing worker almost always lives in the countryside and in a more or less patriarchal relation to his landlord or employer; the proletarian lives, for the most part, in the city and his relation to his employer is purely a cash relation. The manufacturing worker is torn out of his patriarchal relation by big industry, loses whatever property he still has, and in this way becomes a proletarian.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

(1847)

Way, Parting

“Over the last 20 years India’s milk production has tripled; it has increased from 20 million tonnes per annum to 60 million tonnes per annum…. Dairying has become the largest rural employment scheme in this country. And the government has had very little to do with it, even though we are a government institution.”

Verghese Kurien (1921–2012) Indian founder of dairy-cooperative Amul

Quote, The man who revolutionised white

Country

“The Communists were promising retirement for all state employees at age 35. The Socialists were proposing absolutely nothing because they couldn't elect a leader who would propose things. The centre-right parties (of which there were about ten) were all promising employers that they would no longer have to pay workers and would be exempt from prosecution for any industrial pollution that killed fewer than 100,000 people. The far right was proposing, less realistically, to have immigrants barbecued in every place du marché on Friday nights. And in a similar vein, the rural party promised to change the law on endangered species so that hunters could now shoot dodos, unicorns, mermaids and American tourists.”

Stephen Clarke book A Year in the Merde

on political parties in France before an election:
A Year in the Merde (2005)

People, Age, Law, Change

““Are you yourself a Christian?”
The young man made a negative sign. “The concepts of religion baffle me.”
“This inscrutability is perhaps not unintentional,” said the ex-priest. “It gives endless employment to dialecticians who otherwise might become public charges or, at very worst, swindlers and tricksters.””

Jack Vance Lyonesse Trilogy

Source: Lyonesse Trilogy (1983-1989), The Green Pearl (1985), Chapter 1, section 4 (p. 367)

Religion

“What I want to try to prove to you and make clear to you is that the principles of scientific management when properly applied, and when a sufficient amount of time has been given to make them really effective, must in all cases produce far large and better results, both for the employer and the employees, than can possibly be obtained under even this very rare type of management which I have been outlining, namely, the management of ‘initiative and incentive’, in which those on the management’s side deliberately give a very large incentive to their workmen, and in return the workmen respond by working to the very best of their ability at all times in the interest of their employers. I want to show you that scientific management is even far better than this rare type of management.”

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915) American mechanical engineer and tennis player

Source: Testimony of Frederick W. Taylor... 1912, p. 107.

Time

“In secrecy, bureaucracies grow large, ungainly and unaccountable to those they are meant to serve. When there is no fierce spotlight of public accountability shining, there is no pressure to ensure systems are streamlined or even working. What you find throughout any bureaucracy protected by secrecy is a cesspit of illogic and waste. And because the state keeps rebranding, shifting responsibility from one set of bureaucrats to another, most of the work being done is for the purpose of keeping other bureaucrats in employment rather than satisfying the needs of the public.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Page 35.
The Silent State: Secrets, Surveillance and the Myth of British Democracy, 1st Edition

“We are the raison d'être of the entire system. We are also the employers of those in public office and in the public service. Why should we accept from them a discourse which suggests contempt for us and for the democratic system?”

John Ralston Saul The Doubter's Companion

"Criticism"
The Doubter's Companion (1994)

“You imply our education is of no use to you in after life. But no education is. We are not an employment agency; all we can do is to give you a grounding in the art of mixing with your fellow men, to tell you what to expect from life and give you an outward manner and inward poise, an old prescription from the eighteenth century which we call a classical education, an education which confers the infrequent virtues of good sense and good taste and the benefit of dual nationality, English and Mediterranean, and which, taking into account the difficulties of modern life, we find the philosophy best able to overcome them.”

Cyril Connolly book Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 3: A Georgian Boyhood, Ch. 24: Vale (p. 258)

Life, Men, Education, Art

“Business-cycle theorists concerned themselves with why the economy naturally generated fluctuations in employment and output, [while the rest of the profession] continued to operate on the assumption that full employment was the natural, equilibrium position for the economy.”

Robert Aaron Gordon (1908–1978) American economist

Source: Business Fluctuations (1952), p. 340; as cited in: Thomas Cate (2013), An Encyclopedia of Keynesian Economics, Second edition. p. 347

Business, Nature

“While it is possible to play a single game, unrelated to any other game events past or future, it is the campaign for which these rules are designed. It is relatively simple to set up a fantasy campaign, and better still, it will cost almost nothing. In fact you will not even need miniature figures, although their occasional employment is recommended for real spectacle when battles are fought. A quick glance at the Equipment section of this booklet will reveal just how little is required. The most extensive requirement is time. The campaign referee will have to have sufficient time to meet the demands of his players, he will have to devote a number of hours to laying out the maps of his "dungeons" and upper terrain before the affair begins.”

Gary Gygax (1938–2008) American writer and game designer

Preface of the Original Dungeons & Dragons, (1 November 1973)

Game, Time, Past, Future

“The free placement of the means of expression is a privilege enjoyed exclusively by painting [different opinion with Theo van Doesburg]] ]. The sister arts, sculpture and architecture, are more restricted in this respect. The other arts enjoy even less scope in their employment of the means of expression.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote of Mondrian, c. Oct. 1917; as cited in Letters of the great artists, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963 (transl. Daphne Woodward), p. 237
1910's

Art, Sister, Painting

“I long for rural and domestic scenes, for the warbling of Birds and the Prattle of my Children. Don't you think I am somewhat poetical this morning, for one of my Years, and considering the Gravity, and Insipidity of my Employment? — As much as I converse with Sages and Heroes, they have very little of my Love or Admiration. I should prefer the Delights of a Garden to the Dominion of a World.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

Letter http://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/aea/cfm/doc.cfm?id=L17770316ja to Abigail Adams (16 March 1777) 1770s

Love, Children, World, Bird

“You cannot be pro-jobs and anti-business at the same time. You cannot love employment and hate employers.”

Paul Tsongas (1941–1997) American politician

1992 Democratic National Convention. http://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/16/news/under-big-top-excerpts-remarks-delivered-tsongas-brown-convention.html

Love, Hate, Business, Time

“What theory can we use to get us out of the impending slump quickly and reliably? To use the 'new classical' theory of fluctuations begun at Chicago in the 1970s – the theory in which the "risk management" models are embedded – is unthinkable, since it is precisely the theory falsified by the asset price collapse. The thoughts of some have turned to John Maynard Keynes. His insights into uncertainty and speculation were deep. Yet his employment theory was problematic and the 'Keynesian' policy solutions are questionable at best…. At the end of his life Keynes wrote of 'modernist stuff, gone wrong and turned sour and silly'. He told his friend Friedrich Hayek he intended to re-examine his theory in his next book. He would have moved on. The admiration we all have for Keynes's fabulous contributions should not sway us from moving on.”

Edmund Phelps (1933) American economist

Edmund Phelps "Keynes had no sure cure for slumps."in: The Financial Times. Columbia University, November 4, 2008.

Life, Books, Question

“Old Soldiers never die, they only fade away, which has now been commuted to, they never die but only get slightly out of focus. However, the focus must be pretty sharp, for we find our retired Soldiers are in great demand and they secure ready employment in large organisations in the public and private sectors.”

Peter de Noronha (1897–1970) Indian businessman

The Pageant of Life (1964), On Soldiers

“Once a full-employment policy has been adopted… the economic ’system’ just on that account is significantly different. Its equilibrium position has been shifted to a rising curve of trend close to and following the employment ceiling. The conditions of stability about this new level are radically different because the region of operation is now within the less flexible and sharply non-linear range of employment saturation”

Arnold Tustin (1899–1994) British engineer

Source: The Mechanism of Economic Systems (1953), p. 128

“Clearly, the broad effect of economic evolution until about 1920 was to increase the concentration of jobs in the cyclically volatile industries, and this was a major force tending to intensify declines of employment during business contractions. Since then, the continued progress of technology, the very factor which originally was mainly responsible for the concentration in the cyclical industries, has served to arrest this tendency. The upward trend of production in manufacturing and the other highly cyclical industries has remained rapid in recent decades.”

Arthur F. Burns (1904–1987) American economist and diplomat

Source: "Progress Towards Economic Stability", 1969, p. 109-110

Business

“The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.In this book we are concerned with how to create mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people; to realize the democratic dream of equality, justice, peace, cooperation, equal and full opportunities for education, full and useful employment, health, and the creation of those circumstances in which man can have the chance to live by values that give meaning to life.”

Saul D. Alinsky (1909–1972) American community organizer and writer

Source: Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971), p. 3

Life, People, Health, Books

“I am so proud of our system of government, of our free enterprise, where our incentive system and our men who head our big industries are willing to get up at daylight and work until midnight to offer employment and create new jobs for people, where our men working there will try to get decent wages but will sit across the table and not act like cannibals, but will negotiate and reason things out together.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

"Transcript of Television and Radio Interview Conducted by Representatives of Major Broadcast Services.," http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=26108 March 15, 1964. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. 1960s

Men, People

“Faced with the alternative of saying goodbye to the gold standard, and therefore to his own employment, and goodbye to other people's employment, Mr. Churchill characteristically selected the latter course.”

Oswald Mosley (1896–1980) British politician; founder of the British Union of Fascists

Winston Churchill, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, had returned Britain to the gold standard and Mosley believed this would lead to unemployment, quoted in Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley (Papermacs, 1981), p. 143.

People

“By learning to yield to the loving authority… of his parents, a child learns to submit to other forms of authority which will confront him later in his life — his teachers, school principal, police, neighbors and employers.”

James Dobson (1936) Evangelical Christian psychologist, author, and radio broadcaster.

From Dare to Discipline discussed on Good-Natured Child Needs His Share of Parents' Attention, Focus on the Family, 11/21/2004
2004

Love, Life, School, Parent

“I think another impact that it's really important that we all think about, is that contraception when it first became available was a revolution in this country. It allowed women to enter employment and educational opportunities that had previously not been accessible because they were unable to control their reproduction in the same way. And I just can't imagine rolling back the clock on that progress.”

Sandra Fluke (1981) American women's rights activist and lawyer

"Sandra Fluke responds to Nationwide Campaign Against Contraceptives", (February 23, 2012).
U.S. Congressional testimony (February 23, 2012)

Women, Education, Way, Imagination

“Lifelong learning is no longer a luxury but a necessity for employment.”

Jay Samit (1961) American businessman

Source: Disrupt You! (2015), p.64

Learning

“At one time, tips were given only for things you logically would want to have done efficiently and promptly, and they served to supplement a lower payscale for certain classes of employment. This was understood, accepted. It was tourism, back in the century of my birth, cluing in the underdeveloped countries to the fact that all tourists are marks, that set the precedent, which then spread to all countries, even back to the tourists’ own, of the benefits which might be gained by those who wear uniforms and render the undesired and the unrequested with a smile. This is the army that conquered the world. After their quiet revolution in the twentieth century, we all became tourists the minute we set foot outside our front doors, second-class citizens, to be ruthlessly exploited by the smiling legions who had taken over, slyly, completely.”

Roger Zelazny Isle of the Dead

Source: Isle of the Dead (1969), Chapter 2 (p. 45)

World, Smile, Birth, Time

“In all well-conducted concerns the law of "selection of the fittest" sooner or later comes into happy action, when a loyal and attached set of men work together harmoniously for their own advantage as well as for that of their employers.”

James Nasmyth (1808–1890) Scottish mechanical engineer and inventor

Source: James Nasmyth engineer, 1883, p. 218 (p. 181 in 2010 edition)

Men, Law, Happiness

“Gradually it dawned on me how much people in America depended on their employers for all sorts of things that were unimaginable to me: medical care, health savings accounts, and pension contributions, to name the most obvious. The result was that employers ended up having far more power in the relationship than the employee. In America jeopardizing your relationship with your employer carried personal risks that extend far beyond the workplace, to a degree unthinkable where I came from.”

Anu Partanen (1975) journalist

Source: The Nordic Theory of Everything, Chapter 1

People, Health, Dependency, Personality

“Let every man be occupied, and occupied in the highest employment of which his nature is capable, and die with the consciousness that he has done his best.”

Sydney Smith (1771–1845) English writer and clergyman

Vol. I, p. 130
Lady Holland's Memoir (1855), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Nature

“The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

Section II: “What is Progress?”, p. 35 http://books.google.com/books?id=MW8SAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA35&dq=%22The+government,+which+was+designed%22 1910s, The New Freedom (1913)

People, Democracy

“During the next legislature, we will aim for full employment in Spain.”

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (1960) Former Prime Minister of Spain

Debate on the State of the Nation, 3rd July 2007 As President, 2007 Source: http://www.cadenaser.com/economia/audios/prometio-zapatero-llegar-pleno-empleo/csrcsrpor/20090127csrcsreco_2/Aes/

“But because we are financially solid, because we do have an organization that is equipped to handle any situation that comes in front of us, we are successful in getting from the employers what are members want and need without strikes.”

Jimmy Hoffa (1913–1982) American labor leader

CBC Television Interview, Washington, 1960 Watch it Here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWitsAgxd8U

Success

“I saw among them, much merit - much patient suffering - wonderful endurance - industry - care and desire to be and to appear respectable. I saw also the oppression of the laws as well as of most of their employers, and that also in which in its immediate effect is even more intolerable, the contumely with which all who thought themselves above them treated them. I not only saw all this but I felt it also, and I resolved never to abandon the working people and I never will.”

Francis Place (1771–1854) English social reformer

Cited in: Dudley Miles (1988), Francis Place, 1771-1854: the life of a remarkable radical. p. 49

People, Law, Suffering, Appearance

“A ten per cent reduction in military expenditures per year would be reasonable, coupled with a programme of retraining the workforce and redirecting the resources in a manner that creates employment and advances social welfare. I also encourage all States to contribute to the UN’s annual Report on Military Expenditures by submitting complete data on national defence budgets.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

United Nations expert urges states to cut military spending and invest more in human development http://www.unog.ch/80256EDD006B9C2E/(httpNewsByYear_en)/D5D061E9891363C1C1257CB7003055E0?OpenDocument. 2014

“In recent years, hours of work have been reduced, holidays have been increased, the age of entry into employment has gone up, and above all, our general health and expectation of life as a people have markedly improved. It is a natural corollary of these changes that we should work longer and retire later.”

Hugh Gaitskell (1906–1963) British politician

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1951/apr/10/social-insurance-and-assistance#column_849 in the House of Commons (10 April 1951) introducing the 1951 budget

Life, People, Health, Age

“Today the poor are less often dismissed, I hope, from our consciences by being branded as inferior or incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands, it does not eliminate all poverty.
The problem indicates that our emphasis must be twofold. We must create full employment or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this position we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted. New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available.”

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

1960s, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967)

People, Hope, Problem

“Man has such a capacity for rationalization that when he finds himself affluent and able to spend as he pleases he is quick to justify his most indefensible expenditures on the ground that they give some people employment. There is probably no rich person who upon quaffing a glass of champagne does not experience a happy glow of pleasure at the thought of all the vintners, bottlers, freighters, and servants to whom his simple act has given livelihood.”

Ferdinand Lundberg America's 60 Families

America's 60 Families, p. 445 (Vanguard Press, 1938)

People, Pleasure, Personality, Happiness

“Think of late paintings where Christ is the central figure... Remember the large mosaics of Rome. Reconcile the employment of large-scale decorative means and the direct emotions of nature.”

Maurice Denis (1870–1943) French painter

Quote, March 1895, from Denis' Journal; as cited on Wikipedia: Maurice Denis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Denis - reference [23] 1890 - 1920

Nature, Thinking, Christ, Painting

“The official style is at once humble, polite, curt and disagreeable: it derives partly from that used in Byzantine times by the eunuch slave-secretariat, writing stiffly in the name of His Sacred Majesty, whose confidence they enjoyed, to their fellow-slaves outside the palace precincts — for the Emperor had summary power over everyone; and partly from the style used by the cleric-bureaucracy of the Middle Ages, writing stiffly in the name of the feudal lords to their serfs and, though cautious of offending their employers, protected from injury by being servants of the Church, not of the Crown, and so subject to canon, not feudal, law. The official style of civil servants, so far as it recalls its Byzantine derivation, is written by slaves to fellow-slaves of a fictitious tyrant; and, so far as it recalls its mediaeval derivation, is written by members of a quasi-ecclesiastical body, on behalf of quasi-feudal ministers (who, being politicians, come under a different code of behaviour from theirs) to a serflike public.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

Source: The Reader Over Your Shoulder (1943), Ch. 4: "The Use and Abuse of Official English".

Age, Law, Confidence, Time

“The Bible predicts that in the last days of man-made regimes on earth, a totally godless, anti-Christ world government will arise, led by a Devil-possessed dictator, Satan incarnate, who will bring a temporary false peace on earth and a counterfeit utopia. Its price will be enforced worship of him as the imitation Messiah. All of his subjects will be branded with a credit number in order to buy or sell or obtain food or employment, and all those who refuse to cooperate will be hunted, persecuted, and slaughtered by his commandment. This will be a time of Great Tribulation.
This anti-Christ government of anti-Christ forces under the leadership of the Antichrist himself, this superhuman world dictator of man's last one-world godless government, will then set up its headquarters in Jerusalem, his capital, and unite all peoples of the world into a one-world worship of this demon-demagogue and his magical image which can speak.
These startling events will immediately precede the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, which is the major endtime event, the grand climax, as the Lord Himself returns and wipes out the Antichrist and his followers and sets up the last and most lasting and only perfect government the world has ever known, and "the meek shall inherit the earth"”

David Berg (1919–1994) Children of God founder

Psalm 37:11
A More Sure Word of Prophecy (2 Peter 1:19)

People, World, Peace, Food

“Art, industry, and commerce, so long crushed and overborne, were stirring into renewed life, and a crowd of adventurous men, nurtured in war and incapable of repose, must seek employment for their restless energies in fields of peaceful enterprise.”

Francis Parkman (1823–1893) American historian

Pt. II, Ch. 2
Pioneers of France in the New World (1865)

Life, Men, War, Peace

“Strong, responsible unions are essential to industrial fair play. Without them the labor bargain is wholly one-sided. The parties to the labor contract must be nearly equal in strength if justice is to be worked out, and this means that the workers must be organized and that their organizations must be recognized by employers as a condition precedent to industrial peace.”

Louis Brandeis (1856–1941) American Supreme Court Justice

Reported in Osmond Kessler Fraenkel, Clarence Martin Lewis, The Curse of Bigness: Miscellaneous Papers of Louis D. Brandeis (1965), p. 43.
Extra-judicial writings

Peace, Justice, Strong

“As American foreign policy has moved toward the open use of military power to dominate other states, the employment of Orwellian language has become more frequent. Words with emotionally satisfying (or repellant) qualities are increasingly employed to describe their precise opposites. Nowhere is this more in evidence than the claim by President Johnson and Secretary Rusk that the goal of American policy in Southeast Asia is the preservation of “independent” states.”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Source: America's Vietnam Policy, with Richard B. Du Boff, 1966, p. 89.

“Regional Banks that are constrained to lend within a particular area are a necessary part of the institutional ecology in that they resist the centralising power of capital, allow a more stable access to credit for regional and smaller businesses and encourage relationships and reciprocity to constrain the demand for higher rates of return that have decimated the mutual bank sector in Britain. They also offer an alternative to usurious lending, one of the great growth areas in our economy. Any serious reflection on ‘employment policies’ must confront the centralisation of capital and the state and seek to constrain both through the endowment of decentralised regional and sectoral institutions that constrain centralisation and preserve and renew traditions of virtue within the economy through resisting the commodification of human beings, nature and knowledge demanded by the maximum return on investment. It allows initiative and enterprise to be oriented towards the future.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

The Politics of Employment, 23 May 2013 http://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/viewpoints/opinion-pieces/articles/maurice-glasman.html

Business, Nature, Knowledge, Future

“The working classes may be injuriously degraded and oppressed in three ways:1st — When they are neglected in infancy2nd — When they are overworked by their employer, and are thus rendered incompetent from ignorance to make a good use of high wages when they can procure them.3rd — When they are paid low wages for their labour”

Robert Owen (1771–1858) Welsh social reformer

Two Memorials on Behalf of the Working Classes (1818).

Way

“…in Your Majesty's reign the ministers have no power, the nobles enjoy no trust, the soldiers wretchedly poor, the writers are without employment, the traders are without means, and the peasantry are down-trodden… On the Hindu tribes two calamities have descended, (first) the exaction of the jaziya in the town and (second) the oppression of the enemy in the country. When such sufferings have come down upon the heads of the people from all sides, why should they not fail to prey or thank their ruler?”

Aurangzeb (1618–1707) Sixth Mughal Emperor

Muhammad Akbar to Aurangzeb; see Studies in Mughal India: Being Historical Essays by Jadunath Sarkar, p. 102, Essays on Medieval Indian History by Satish Chandra, p. 324; Mughal Empire in India, 1526-1761: Volume 2 by Shripad Rama Sharma, p. 637; The Mughal-Maratha Relations: Twenty Five Fateful Years, 1682-1707 by G. T. Kulkarni, p. 22
Quotes from late medieval histories

People, Suffering, Country

“Philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection of data. History of science indicates that, particularly in the early developmental stages of a new paradigm, it is not even very difficult to invent such alternates. But that invention of alternates is just what scientists seldom undertake except during the pre-paradigm stage of their science’s development and at very special occasions during its subsequent evolution. So long as the tools a paradigm supplies continue to prove capable of solving the problems it defines, science moves fastest and penetrates most deeply through confident employment of those tools. The reason is clear. As in manufacture so in science—retooling is an extravagance to be reserved for the occasion that demands it. The significance of crises is the indication they provide that an occasion for retooling has arrived.”

Thomas Kuhn book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), VII. Crisis and the Emergence of Scientific Theories, p. 76 (2012 ed.)

Confidence, History, Problem, Science

“Once upon a time leftists and radicals talked of liberation or the abolition of work. Now the talk is about full employment.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: The End of Utopia (1999), p. 21

Time

“It is an easy and patriotic matter for the lawyer, minister, professor, employer, or investor, placed above the arena of competition, to proclaim the equal right of all races to American opportunities; to avow his own willingness to give way should even a better Chinaman, Hindu, or Turk come in to take his place; and to rebuke the racial hatred of those who resist this displacement. His patriotism and world-wide brotherhood cost him and his family nothing, and indeed they add to his profits and leisure.”

John R. Commons (1862–1945) United States institutional economist and labor historian

pgs. 115-16.
Races and Immigrants in America, 1907

World, Family, Way

“Workers do not try to prevent employers from making contributions to political parties the workers do not support.”

Stanley Knowles (1908–1997) Canadian politician

Source: The New Party - (1961), Chapter 9, Is Your Criticism Here?, p. 117

Support

“In my opinion the Government can do more to remedy the economic ills of the people by a system of rigid economy in public expenditure than can be accomplished through any other action. The costs of our national and local governments combined now stand at a sum close to $100 for each inhabitant of the land. A little less than one-third of this is represented by national expenditure, and a little more than two-thirds by local expenditure. It is an ominous fact that only the National Government is reducing its debt. Others are increasing theirs at about $1,000,000,000 each year. The depression that overtook business, the disaster experienced in agriculture, the lack of employment and the terrific shrinkage in all values which our country experienced in a most acute form in 1920, resulted in no small measure from the prohibitive taxes which were then levied on all productive effort. The establishment of a system of drastic economy in public expenditure, which has enabled us to pay off about one-fifth of the national debt since 1919, and almost cut in two the national tax burden since 1921, has been one of the main causes in reestablishing a prosperity which has come to include within its benefits almost every one of our inhabitants. Economy reaches everywhere. It carries a blessing to everybody.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)

People, Business, Effort, Country

“The worker is by nature less imaginative, more level-headed than the capitalist. This is what prevents his becoming one. He is content with small gains. Trade Union officials think about the petty cash; the employer speculates in millions. You can see the difference in their representative institutions. There is no scheme too wild, no rumour too absurd, to be without repercussions on the Stock Exchange. The public house is the home of common sense.”

A.J.P. Taylor (1906–1990) Historian

"Dissenting Rivals: Urquhart and Cobden", p. 55
The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792-1939 (1957)

Home, Imagination, Nature, Thinking

“When I became gainfully employed, I didn’t stop being a revolutionary. I simply had to make sure my interests were aligned with my employer.”

Justine Tunney Software developer from the USA

Tweet, 28 March 2014 https://twitter.com/JustineTunney/status/449298225884053504, Tunney is employed by Google.

“In fact, it would be very easy to ‘prove’ Marx’s analysis to have been wrong, if experience had shown, for example, that the more capitalist industry develops, the smaller and smaller the average factory becomes, the less it depends upon new technology, the more its capital is supplied by the workers themselves, the more workers become owners of their factories, the less the part of wages taken by consumer goods becomes (and the greater becomes the part of wages used for buying the workers’ own means of production). If, in addition, there had been decades without economic fluctuations and a full-scale disappearance of trade unions and employers’ associations (all flowing from the disappearance of contradictions between Capital and Labour, inasmuch as workers increasingly become the controllers of their own means and conditions of production), then one could indeed say that Capital was so much rubbish and had dismally failed to predict what would happen in the real capitalist world a century after its publication.”

Ernest Mandel (1923–1995) Belgian economist and Marxist philosopher

Introduction to Capital. Introduction to volume 1 (1976)

World, Parting, Dependency

“The last speaker alluded to this movement as being that of a few disappointed women. From the first years to which my memory stretches, I have been a disappointed woman… I was disappointed when I came to seek a profession worthy an immortal being—every employment was closed to me, except those of the teacher, the seamstress, and the housekeeper. In education, in marriage, in religion, in everything, disappointment is the lot of woman. It shall be the business of my life to deepen this disappointment in every woman's heart until she bows down to it no longer.”

Lucy Stone (1818–1893) American abolitionist and suffragist

Remark made at a National Woman's Rights Convention in Cincinnati, Ohio. (1855) as quoted in Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings (1972) by Miriam Schnier

Life, Women, Marriage, Education

“My proposition is this: A vast number of Americans who oppose legalization and fear new waves of immigration would change their minds if we could radically reduce new — i. e., future — illegal immigration. Forget employer sanctions. Build a barrier. It is simply ridiculous to say it cannot be done. If one fence won't do it, then build a second 100 yards behind it. And then build a road for patrols in between. Put in cameras. Put in sensors. Put out lots of patrols.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

"First a wall — then amnesty" in The Washington Post (7 April 2006) https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2006/04/07/first-a-wall-then-amnesty/3a4e0da4-653c-45fe-b651-59e0f06d34c3/?utm_term=.21a76dc8d370 2000s, 2006

Fear, Change, Future, Forgetting

“How various his employments whom the world
Calls idle, and who justly in return
Esteems that busy world an idler too!”

William Cowper The Task

Source: The Task (1785), Book III, The Garden, Line 352.

World, Business

“It is impossible for a poet to fashion the voice deliberately by contrivance and experiment; it could not be discovered or simulated through the cultivation of an eccentric diction or prosody, or by the employment of regional speech rhythms and patterns.”

Vernon Scannell (1922–2007) British boxer and poet

A Proper Gentleman, 1977

Fashion

“Technological progress — and it is a pity more do not appreciate it — is the one sound approach to increased employment and higher wages. There is no other way. Irrespective of what is being said to the contrary, new industries can be created, present industries can be expanded, unemployment can be eliminated in a practical way”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: Adventures of a White-Collar Man. 1941, p. 10; Published earlier in: Drugs, Oils & Paints, (1939). Vol. 54-55, p. 335

Way

“It is essential condition to maintain mutual trust and confidence between the employer and the employee to obtain the goal of rapid economic development and social justice.”

V. V. Giri (1894–1980) Indian politician and 4th president of India

Pravin Durai in: Human Resource Management http://books.google.co.in/books?id=aan1hKH_ejUC&pg=PA387, Pearson Education India, p. 387 Explaining his theme of the tree of socialism with the root comprising human beings.

Justice, Confidence

“The present estimated margin between public receipts and expenditures for this fiscal year is very small. Perhaps the most important work that this session of the Congress can do is to continue a policy of economy and further reduce the cost of government, in order that we may have a reduction of taxes for the next fiscal year. Nothing is more likely to produce that public confidence which is the forerunner and the mainstay of prosperity, encourage and enlarge business opportunity with ample opportunity for employment at good wages, provide a larger market for agricultural products, and put our country in a stronger position to be able to meet the world competition in trade, than a continuing policy of economy. Of course necessary costs must be met, proper functions of the Government performed, and constant investments for capital account and reproductive effort must be carried on by our various departments. But the people must know that their Government is placing upon them no unnecessary burden.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)

People, World, Confidence, Business

“Cicero bent Greek ideas to his vision of the idealized Roman Republic, and his understanding of the mores—the morality and social attachments—of the gentlemanly statesmen who would hold power in a just republic. Readers familiar with Machiavelli’s Prince will hear curious echoes of that work in Cicero’s advice; curious because the pieties of Cicero’s advice to the would-be statesman were satirized by Machiavelli sixteen hundred years later. If his philosophy was Greek and eclectic, Cicero owed his constitutional theory to Polybius; he was born soon after Polybius died, and read his history. And Cicero greatly admired Polybius’s friend and employer Scipio the Younger. There are obvious differences of tone. Polybius celebrated Rome’s achievement of equipoise, while Cicero lamented the ruin of the republic. Cicero’s account of republican politics veers between a “constitutional” emphasis on the way that good institutions allow a state to function by recruiting men of good but not superhuman character, and a “heroic” emphasis on the role of truly great men in reconstituting the state when it has come to ruin. Cicero’s vanity was so notorious that everyone knew he had himself in mind as this hero—had he not saved the republic before when he quelled the conspiracy of Catiline?”

Alan Ryan (1940) British philosopher

On Politics: A History of Political Thought: From Herodotus to the Present (2012), Ch. 4 : Roman Insights: Polybius and Cicero

Men, Way, History, Idea

“The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding, and too plain to need explanation, saw in the mysticism of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system, which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power and pre-eminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them; and for this obvious reason, that nonsense can never be explained.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to John Adams (5 July 1814). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes http://oll.libertyfund.org/ToC/0054.php, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 11 http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/0054-11_Bk.pdf, pp. 397–398 1810s

Understanding, Christ

“Americanization having its roots in political ideals cannot be achieved so long as these ideals, as interpreted by the sources of authority in America, mean one thing for the native-born and another thing for the foreign-born; one thing for men and another for women; one thing for employers and another for employees; one thing for the rich and another for the poor; one thing in one State and another thing in an adjoining State. No American who hopes for national unity can spend too much time insisting upon the most painstaking interpretation of the guarantees of American law, even though it takes him into such technical matters as interpreter service, cost of appeals, discriminatory laws, and race prejudices. Every support of a sound Americanism is strong or weak according as justice is done or not done.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Women, Men, Justice, Law

“One of the most striking trends, since at least the 1960's, has been for employment in services to grow far more rapidly than employment in manufacturing. It is this trend that has led to the view that developed economies have become de-industrialized and that they are now effectively service economies.”

Peter Dicken (1938) British geographer

Source: Global Shift (2003) (Fourth Edition), Chapter 16, Making a Living in Developed Countries, p. 525

“I wish it culminates in something positive and we can both grow economically. The money we spend on weapons can be used to give water to the people, to educate everybody, to give them medical aid and to give employment to the youth of the country.”

Sunil Dutt (1929–2005) Hindi film actor

We all are one, whichever religion we belong to

Money, People, Youth, Education

“The maximum of motive power resulting from the employment of steam is also the maximum of motive power realizable by any means whatever.”

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (1796–1832) French physicist, the "father of thermodynamics" (1796–1832)

p, 125
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)

Motivation

“We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. Presumably the plans for our employment were being changed. I was to learn later in life that, perhaps because we are so good at organizing, we tend as a nation to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.”

Charlton Ogburn (1911–1998) American journalist and author

From "Merrill's Marauders: The truth about an incredible adventure" http://www.harpers.org/archive/1957/01/0007289 in the January 1957 issue of Harper's Magazine Usually misattributed to Petronius See Brown, David S. "Petronius or Ogburn?", Public Administration Review, Vol. 38, No. 3 (May - Jun., 1978), p. 296 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0033-3352(197805%2F06)38%3A3%3C296%3APOO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Z alternate version:As a result, I suppose, of high-level changes of mind about how we were to be used, we went though several reorganizations. Perhaps because Americans as a nation have a gift for organizing, we tend to meet any new situation by reorganization, and a wonderful method it is for creating the illusion of progress at the mere cost of confusion, inefficiency and demoralization. The Maurauders (1959) chapter 2, page 60

Life, Learning, Change, Time

“Beyond the realm of radical protests, there is also fear among many citizens about what this new society, of which the Internet is the symbol, will bring about in terms of employment, education, social protection, and lifestyles.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001), Conclusion, The Challenges of the Network Society, p. 276

Education, Fear

“GOVERNMENT SURPLUS: Employment figures and history books are 'cooked'. Young people are manipulated. The status quo is maintained by an insidious mafiosi piping drugs to the unsuspecting by means of an ever expanding cycloptic media.”

Roy Harper (singer) (1941) British musician

People, Books, History, Cooking

Quotes about employment page 2

Quotes about employment
page 2