Quotes about salary

A collection of quotes on the topic of salary, people, pay, doing.

Quotes about salary

Ruth Bader Ginsburg photo
Leonardo DiCaprio photo
Mwanandeke Kindembo photo
Terry Pratchett photo
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman photo
Henry Rollins photo
Upton Sinclair photo

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) American novelist, writer, journalist, political activist

Source: I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (1935), ; repr. University of California Press, 1994, p. 109.
Context: I used to say to our audiences: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

Mark Twain photo
Nassim Nicholas Taleb photo

“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960) Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst
Benjamin Disraeli photo
Hugo Diemer photo

“Students are here not for service or for culture, but for the selfish end of preparing for salary to come. Constantly I hear them asking, 'If I change over to your course, what kind of a job will it help me to get when I graduate?' Students are weighing every subject they take on the scales of jobs to come.”

Hugo Diemer (1870–1937) American mechanical engineer

Hugo Diemer, cited in: Michael Bezilla (June 1985) [1986]. " Shaping a Modern College http://web.archive.org/web/20080104065415/http://www.libraries.psu.edu/speccolls/psua/psgeneralhistory/bezillapshistory/083s03.htm". Penn State: An Illustrated History. Pennsylvania State University Press.

Henry Ford photo
Eduardo Galeano photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Dorothy Parker photo

“Salary is no object: I want only enough to keep body and soul apart.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

New Yorker (4 February 1928)

Naomi Wolf photo
Eliezer Yudkowsky photo
Richard Nixon photo

“Well, then, some of you will say, and rightly, "Well, what did you use the fund for, Senator? Why did you have to have it?" Let me tell you in just a word how a Senate office operates. First of all, a Senator gets $15,000 a year in salary. He gets enough money to pay for one trip a year, a round trip, that is, for himself, and his family between his home and Washington, DC. And then he gets an allowance to handle the people that work in his office to handle his mail. And the allowance for my State of California, is enough to hire 13 people. And let me say, incidentally, that that allowance is not paid to the Senator. It is paid directly to the individuals that the Senator puts on his payroll. But all of these people and all of these allowances are for strictly official business; business, for example, when a constituent writes in and wants you to go down to the Veteran's Administration and get some information about his GI policy — items of that type, for example. But there are other expenses that are not covered by the Government. And I think I can best discuss those expenses by asking you some questions.Do you think that when I or any other senator makes a political speech, has it printed, should charge the printing of that speech and the mailing of that speech to the taxpayers? Do you think, for example, when I or any other Senator makes a trip to his home State to make a purely political speech that the cost of that trip should be charged to the taxpayers? Do you think when a Senator makes political broadcasts or political television broadcasts, radio or television, that the expense of those broadcasts should be charged to the taxpayers? Well I know what your answer is. It's the same answer that audiences give me whenever I discuss this particular problem: The answer is no. The taxpayers shouldn't be required to finance items which are not official business but which are primarily political business.”

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America

1950s, Checkers speech (1952)

Ursula K. Le Guin photo
Lee Kuan Yew photo
Vladimir Lenin photo
Adolf Hitler photo

“We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

This misattribution is sourced from John Toland. In Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography (1976), it is attributed to Hitler in a speech of May 1, 1927. It is recorded in Thoughts about the Tasks of the Future by Gregor Strasser on June 15, 1926.
Misattributed

George Washington Plunkitt photo
George Washington Plunkitt photo

“You can’t be patriotic on a salary that just keeps the wolf from the door. p. 56”

George Washington Plunkitt (1842–1924) New York State Senator

Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, Chapter 13, On Municipal Ownership

Sri Aurobindo photo
Shirley Manson photo
Jair Bolsonaro photo

“I can't even go to Paraguay with my salary.”

Jair Bolsonaro (1955) Brazilian president elect

At the program Câmera Aberta at Band on 23 May 1999. O dia que Bolsonaro quis matar FHC, sonegar impostos e declarar guerra civil http://www.gazetadopovo.com.br/politica/republica/o-dia-que-bolsonaro-quis-matar-fhc-sonegar-impostos-e-declarar-guerra-civil-8mtm0u0so6pk88kqnqo0n1l69. Gazeta do Povo (10 October 2017).

Lucy Aharish photo
Alastair Reynolds photo
Milton Friedman photo
John Gay photo
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan photo
Robert Lynn Asprin photo

““How much did that ridiculous maintenance job of yours pay?”
Skeeter blinked. “Five bucks an hour, why?”
“Five bucks? That’s not a salary, that’s slavery!””

Robert Lynn Asprin (1946–2008) American science fiction and fantasy author

Source: The House that Jack Built (2001), Chapter 1 (p. 14)

Adolf Hitler photo

“We must close union offices, confiscate their money and put their leaders in prison. We must reduce workers salaries and take away their right to strike.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

"I cannot speak to the authenticity of the quotation ... attributed to Hitler in the very many Web postings at which it is found, and without devoting far more research time than it warrants." - Ken Leford http://thepragmaticprogressive.blogspot.com/2011/03/hitler-and-unions.html.
Disputed

Edgar Rice Burroughs photo
Francis Escudero photo

“We must enlist the best and the brightest to serve in government, and pay them a salary equivalent to what they would earn in the private sector.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2009, Speech: The Socio-Economic Peace Program of Senator Francis Escudero

Ernesto Che Guevara photo
Albrecht Thaer photo
Joseph Strutt photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Warren Farrell photo
Tomáš Baťa photo
Andrew Carnegie photo
John F. Kennedy photo

“I appreciate very much your generous invitation to be here tonight. You bear heavy responsibilities these days and an article I read some time ago reminded me of how particularly heavily the burdens of present day events bear upon your profession. You may remember that in 1851 the New York Herald Tribune under the sponsorship and publishing of Horace Greeley, employed as its London correspondent an obscure journalist by the name of Karl Marx.
We are told that foreign correspondent Marx, stone broke, and with a family ill and undernourished, constantly appealed to Greeley and managing editor Charles Dana for an increase in his munificent salary of $5 per installment, a salary which he and Engels ungratefully labeled as the "lousiest petty bourgeois cheating."
But when all his financial appeals were refused, Marx looked around for other means of livelihood and fame, eventually terminating his relationship with the Tribune and devoting his talents full time to the cause that would bequeath the world the seeds of Leninism, Stalinism, revolution and the cold war.
If only this capitalistic New York newspaper had treated him more kindly; if only Marx had remained a foreign correspondent, history might have been different. And I hope all publishers will bear this lesson in mind the next time they receive a poverty-stricken appeal for a small increase in the expense account from an obscure newspaper man.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1961, Address to ANPA

Francisco De Goya photo

“My position is entirely different from what the majority of the public imagine... I want a great deal, firstly because my position entails expenditure, and secondly because I like it. Being a very well-known man I cannot reduce my expenses as other people do. I was about to ask for an increase of salary, but the conditions are so unfavorable that I must set the idea aside.”

Francisco De Goya (1746–1828) Spanish painter and printmaker (1746–1828)

letter to his friend Martín Zapater, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3915977 and https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bestand:Francisco_de_Goya_-_Portrait_of_Mart%C3%ADn_Zapater_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg, February, 1790, from Francisco Zapater y Gomez: Goya; Noticias biograficas, Zaragoza, 1868, La Perse Verencia, p. 50
Goya is reacting on a request to borrow money, which arouses his quick protest
1790s

Milton Friedman photo

“Thanks to economists, all of us, from the days of Adam Smith and before right down to the present, tariffs are perhaps one tenth of one percent lower than they otherwise would have been. … And because of our efforts, we have earned our salaries ten-thousand fold.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

Speaking at a meeting of the American Economic Association, as quoted by Walter Block in "Milton Friedman RIP" in Mises Daily (16 November 2006) http://mises.org/story/2393

George William Curtis photo

“For what do we now see in the country? We see a man who, as Senator of the United States, voted to tamper with the public mails for the benefit of slavery, sitting in the President's chair. Two days after he is seated we see a judge rising in the place of John Jay — who said, 'Slaves, though held by the laws of men, are free by the laws of God' — to declare that a seventh of the population not only have no original rights as men, but no legal rights as citizens. We see every great office of State held by ministers of slavery; our foreign ambassadors not the representatives of our distinctive principle, but the eager advocates of the bitter anomaly in our system, so that the world sneers as it listens and laughs at liberty. We see the majority of every important committee of each house of Congress carefully devoted to slavery. We see throughout the vast ramification of the Federal system every little postmaster in every little town professing loyalty to slavery or sadly holding his tongue as the price of his salary, which is taxed to propagate the faith. We see every small Custom-House officer expected to carry primary meetings in his pocket and to insult at Fourth-of-July dinners men who quote the Declaration of Independence. We see the slave-trade in fact, though not yet in law, reopened — the slave-law of Virginia contesting the freedom of the soil of New York We see slave-holders in South Carolina and Louisiana enacting laws to imprison and sell the free citizens of other States. Yes, and on the way to these results, at once symptoms and causes, we have seen the public mails robbed — the right of petition denied — the appeal to the public conscience made by the abolitionists in 1833 and onward derided and denounced, and their very name become a byword and a hissing. We have seen free speech in public and in private suppressed, and a Senator of the United States struck down in his place for defending liberty. We have heard Mr. Edward Everett, succeeding brave John Hancock and grand old Samuel Adams as governor of the freest State in history, say in his inaugural address in 1836 that all discussion of the subject which tends to excite insurrection among the slaves, as if all discussion of it would not be so construed, 'has been held by highly respectable legal authorities an offence against the peace of the commonwealth, which may be prosecuted as a misdemeanor at common law'. We have heard Daniel Webster, who had once declared that the future of the slave was 'a widespread prospect of suffering, anguish, and death', now declaring it to be 'an affair of high morals' to drive back into that doom any innocent victim appealing to God and man, and flying for life and liberty. We have heard clergymen in their pulpits preaching implicit obedience to the powers that be, whether they are of God or the Devil — insisting that God's tribute should be paid to Caesar, and, by sneering at the scruples of the private conscience, denouncing every mother of Judea who saved her child from the sword of Herod's soldiers.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

Hugh Macmillan, Baron Macmillan photo
Jair Bolsonaro photo

“I wouldn't hire them [women] with the same salary. But there are many women who are competent.”

Jair Bolsonaro (1955) Brazilian president elect

About equal pay for women. Bolsonaro diz que não pagaria a mulheres o mesmo salário dos homens http://www.redetv.uol.com.br/superpop/videos/ultimos-programas/bolsonaro-diz-que-nao-pagaria-a-mulheres-o-mesmo-salario-dos-homens. RedeTV! (15 February 2016).

Buckminster Fuller photo
Joseph Goebbels photo
Aubrey Beardsley photo

“There was a young man with a salary,
Who had to do drawings for Malory;
When they asked him for more,
He replied, 'Why? Sure
You've enough as it is for a gallery.”

Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) English illustrator and author

On illustrating Le Mort d'Arthur (1893), as quoted in Aubrey Beardsley : A Biography (1999) by Matthew Sturgis, p. 155

Chetan Bhagat photo

“In the first three months, half of my salary went for a pigeonhole in the Siberian end of town.”

Chetan Bhagat (1974) Indian author, born 1974

Source: Five Point Someone - What not to do at IIT! (2004), P. 270

Babe Ruth photo
Evelyn Waugh photo
Rupert Boneham photo
George Washington Plunkitt photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
June Vincent photo
Ai Weiwei photo
Albrecht Thaer photo
Jeet Thayil photo
Hebe de Bonafini photo

“Verbitsky is a servant of the United States. He receives a salary form the Ford Foundation, and in addition to being a Jew, is totally pro-North American.”

Hebe de Bonafini (1928) President of the Association of Mothers of Plaza de Mayo

Source: Old Ideas in New Discourses: "The War Against Terrorism" and Collective Memory in Uruguay and Argentina http://essays.ssrc.org/sept11/essays/marchesi.htm Ser judío http://www.pagina12.com.ar/2001/01-10/01-10-28/pag15.htm, Página/12, 2001).

Warren Farrell photo
Boris Yeltsin photo
Babe Ruth photo

“I'd play for half my salary if I could hit in this dump all the time.”

Babe Ruth (1895–1948) American baseball player

Assessment of Wrigley Field shouted during batting practice on October 1, 1932, just prior to Game 3 of the World Series, as recalled by Ruth in a February 1944 interview with Chicago Daily News sports editor John Carmichael; as reproduced in "The Sports Parade" by Braven Dryer, in The Los Angeles Times (February 23, 1944), p. A7; and in Babe Ruth's Called Shot: The Myth and Mystery of Baseball's Greatest Home Run https://books.google.com/books?id=JlOsBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA80 (2014) by Ed Sherman, p. 80

David Coburn (politician) photo
Stanley Baldwin photo
Gabrielle Roy photo
Steve Gerber photo
John le Carré photo
William H. Rehnquist photo
Camille Paglia photo
Maria Bamford photo
David Berg photo
Naomi Klein photo
Jorge Majfud photo
Gillian Anderson photo

“We shot the first five seasons up in Vancouver, so we were protected from the public mania, and the industry mania, for the most part. I was first exposed to it when I became pregnant in the first season, and I quickly learned the power of the machine; then again when I was trying to negotiate my salary to be closer to equal to what David [Duchovny] was making, rather than a quarter. Yes, it's been an ongoing education, but it continues to astound me.”

Gillian Anderson (1968) American-British film, television and theatre actress, activist and writer

On the wage gap and how The X-Files helped her understand the entertainment industry — Hunger TV "One From The Archives: The Interview: Gillian Anderson" http://www.hungertv.com/feature/interview-gillian-anderson/ (October 19, 2014)
2010s

H.L. Mencken photo
Stephen Fry photo
Jakaya Kikwete photo
Alan Blinder photo
Hunter S. Thompson photo