Quotes about work
page 58

Fritz Todt photo
Bernie Sanders photo

“What we have seen is that while the average person is working longer hours for lower wages, we have seen a huge increase in income and wealth inequality, which is now reaching obscene levels. This is a rigged economy, which works for the rich and the powerful, and is not working for ordinary Americans … You know, this country just does not belong to a handful of billionaires.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

[Staff, Bernie Sanders confirms presidential run and damns America's inequities, http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/30/bernie-sanders-confirms-presidential-run-and-damns-americas-inequities, 29 April 2015, the Guardian, 2 May 2015]
2010s, 2015

John Updike photo

“Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

Writers on Themselves (1986)

H.L. Mencken photo
Alan M. Dershowitz photo
Eric R. Kandel photo
P. L. Deshpande photo

“It was also suggested that, In London, I should work as a porter to gain some monetary pounds while losing some pounds in weight.”

P. L. Deshpande (1919–2000) Marathi writer, humourist, actor, dramatist

In his travelogue Apoorvai (अपूर्वाइ), Pu La describes the non-stop flow of advice before traveling to London. This quote is one advice given to him on learning on how many pounds porters charge for carrying baggage on train stations in London.
From his various literature

Margaret Thatcher photo
Hugh Gaitskell photo

“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

John Bright photo
Jonathan Edwards photo
Adolf Hitler photo

“Because of the lack of productive capacities of its own, the Jewish Folk cannot carry out the construction of a State, viewed in a territorial sense, but as a support of its own existence it needs the work and creative activities of other nations. Thus the existence of the Jew himself becomes a parasitical one within the lives of other Folks. Hence the ultimate goal of the Jewish struggle for existence is the enslavement of productively active Folks. In order to achieve this goal, which in reality has represented Jewry's struggle for existence at all times, the Jew makes use of all weapons that are in keeping with the whole complex of his character. Therefore in domestic politics within the individual nations he fights first for equal rights and later for superior rights. The characteristics of cunning, intelligence, astuteness, knavery, dissimulation, and so on, rooted in the character of his Folkdom, serve him as weapons thereto. They are as much stratagems in his war of survival as those of other Folks in combat. In foreign policy, he tries to bring nations into a state of unrest, to divert them from their true interests, and to plunge them into reciprocal wars, and in this way gradually rise to mastery over them with the help of the power of money and propaganda. His ultimate goal is the denationalisation, the promiscuous bastardisation of other Folks, the lowering of the racial levy of the highest Folks, as well as the domination of this racial mishmash through the extirpation of the Folkish intelligentsia and its replacement by the members of his own Folk.”

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

1920s, Zweites Buch (1928)

Amir Taheri photo
Henry Ward Beecher photo
Robert Solow photo
Vincent Van Gogh photo
Marc Maron photo

“I'm just saying, a lot of people are on medicine, they don't need to be. Because let's be honest folks, it isn't easy for anyone. And I think in most cases, the only difference between depression and disappointment is your level of commitment. And to be honest, in the day and age we live in now, if someone comes up to you and says, “I think you might be clinically depressed,” the proper response is, “Thank you, thank you very much. That means I’m awake." Is there any indication we shouldn’t be depressed— are you living on the same planet that I am? Did you ever think that depression is the reasonable human response to the crap we’re going through as a species, meant to propel us into the next evolutionary step, or at least into taking some different course of action so we might survive? Did you ever think that maybe it’s the happy people that are really screwed up in the head? Where’s that spin on the situation? Maybe it's those guys. "Hey, how ya doing?" "I don't know, I feel great, again!" "Really, well, that's creepy and weird. Maybe you should be on medication. Clearly you're self-centered, delusional, narcissistic. I don't know, but you're draining me with your happy. Could you move along because I'm doing the big work, creating a world that functions properly in my brain."”

Marc Maron (1963) Comedian

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/2ufif7/comedy-central-presents-bipolar-coaster
Comedy Central Presents (2007)

Donald J. Trump photo

“In my life, there are two things I've found I'm very good at: overcoming obstacles and motivating good people to do their best work.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Source: 1980s, Trump: The Art of the Deal (1987), p. 367

Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Mary Kay Andrews photo
Benjamin R. Barber photo
David Spade photo
John Berger photo
Spencer Tunick photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
James Hudson Taylor photo
John Ruskin photo
Philip K. Dick photo
Will Arnett photo
Thomas Aquinas photo
D. L. Hughley photo
Jonathan Edwards photo

“Love is the active, working principle in all true faith. It is its very soul, without which it is dead. "Faith works by love."”

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) Christian preacher, philosopher, and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 396.

Walter Lippmann photo
Jacopone da Todi photo
Haruki Murakami photo
George Takei photo

“I've been working with Bill Shatner yea these 40-plus years. He never seems to get it right. I gave him, "It's Takei, as in way." I even said, "as in gay"… I told him, "It's Takei, rhymes with toupee."”

George Takei (1937) American actor and author

I thought that would do it.
Quoted in Doug Elfman, "Takei celebrates legacy of diversity," http://www.lvrj.com/news/26861469.html Las Vegas Review-Journal (2008-08-12)
Describing how he advised William Shatner, who reportedly could never pronounce his name correctly, how to say it aloud.

Anne Bancroft photo
Tessa Virtue photo
Paul Klee photo
Erving Goffman photo
Jack London photo
Russell Brand photo
John Hall photo
Robert Morgan photo
Alfred Stieglitz photo
Bill Clinton photo

“Now, I have to go back to work on my State of the Union speech. And I worked on it until pretty late last night. I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time, never. These allegations are false, and I need to go back to work for the American people.”

Bill Clinton (1946) 42nd President of the United States

Clinton denying that he had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSDAXGXGiEw.
Remarks on the After-School Child Care Initiative, Roosevelt Room, White House Remarks on the After-School Child Care Initiative http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=56257 (January 26, 1998)
1990s

Aleksandr Vasilevsky photo
Colin Wilson photo
A.S. Neill photo
Herta Müller photo
James Comey photo
Kevin Kelly photo

“One can imagine the future shape of companies by stretching them until they are pure network. It will be hard at times to tell who is working for whom.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

Pope Benedict XVI photo
Patrick Stump photo
Arthur Sullivan photo

“One day work is hard, and another day it is easy; but if I had waited for inspiration I am afraid I should have done nothing. The miner does not sit at the top of the shaft waiting for the coal to come bubbling up to the surface. One must go deep down, and work out every vein carefully.”

Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900) English composer of the Gilbert & Sullivan duo

Untitled essay, reprinted in Arthur Lawrence Sir Arthur Sullivan: Life-story, Letters and Reminiscences (London: James Bowden, 1899) p. 225.

C.K. Prahalad photo

“Assume responsibility for outcomes as well as for the processes and people you work with. How you achieve results will shape the kind of person you become.”

C.K. Prahalad (1941–2010) Indian academic

C. K. Prahalad, cited in: Simone P. Joyaux (2011), Strategic Fund Development, p. 7

Lynda Gratton photo

“You can't expect that what you've become a master in will keep you valuable throughout the whole of your career, and you want to add to that the fact that most people are now going to be working into their 70s. Being a generalist is, in my view, very unwise. Your major competitor is Wikipedia or Google.”

Lynda Gratton (1953) Business theorist

Lynda Gratton, cited in: Shalia Dewan, " Working Nonstop to Stay Relevant http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A00EFDF1539F931A1575AC0A9649D8B63," New York Times, September 22, 2012.

Nathan Lane photo

“A sitcom is the closest thing for me to doing stage because you work in front of an audience, and if it's well written it can be very satisfying.”

Nathan Lane (1956) American actor

Sunday Tasmanian staff (January 4, 1998) "This Is A Very Mice Story!", Sunday Tasmanian, p. 037.

Vitruvius photo

“Our understanding of the four basic concepts of Physics -- space, time, matter and force -- has undergone radical change in the course of work on unification, starting with Maxwell's unification of electricity with magnetism, all the way to present day string theory. What started as four independent concepts, with space and time postulated and the possible forms of matter and force arbitrarily chosen, now appear as different aspects of a rich and novel dynamically determined structure.”

Peter Freund (1936–2018) American physicist

Physics and Geometry, a paper written for the Symposium on Theoretical Physics at the University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland on August 28, 2003 and at the Freydoon Mansouri Memorial Session of the 3rd International Symposium on Quantum Theory and Symmetries at the University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, on September 13, 2003. Report #EFI03-47.

Narendra Modi photo
Nastassja Kinski photo

“Most people have music in the center of their lives. I believe my work sheds light on how music affects us and why it is so influential.”

Susan McClary (1946) American musicologist

from http://web.archive.org/20030225083736/www.ucla.edu/spotlight/archive/html_2001_2002/fac0502_mcclalry.html

Carl Friedrich Gauss photo

“To praise it would amount to praising myself. For the entire content of the work … coincides almost exactly with my own meditations which have occupied my mind for the past thirty or thirty-five years.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) German mathematician and physical scientist

Letter to Farkas Bolyai, on his son János Bolyai's 1832 publishings on non-Euclidean geometry.

Carl I. Hagen photo

“Immigrants in Norway must learn Norwegian. The same should Spaniards in Spain do, if they want to work with Norwegians.”

Carl I. Hagen (1944) Norwegian politician

Speech at a local Progress Party chapter in Alfaz del Pi, Spain, published in Dagbladet (22 April 2006) http://www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/2006/04/22/464171.html

Tim Cook photo
Thomas Carlyle photo
Linda McQuaig photo
Margaret Mead photo
Alex Salmond photo
Gerhard Richter photo
Charles Taze Russell photo
David Lloyd George photo

“I lay down as a proposition that most of the people who work hard for a living in the country belong to the Liberal Party. I would say, and I think, without offence, that most of the people who never worked for a living at all belong to the Tory Party.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Newcastle (9 October 1909), quoted in Better Times: Speeches by the Right Hon. D. Lloyd George, M.P., Chancellor of the Exchequer (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910), p. 160.
Chancellor of the Exchequer

Lewis H. Lapham photo
Alvin C. York photo
Ovadia Yosef photo

“Why are Gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat. That is why Gentiles were created.”

Ovadia Yosef (1920–2013) Israeli rabbi

19 October 2010 article on Jerusalem Post http://www.jpost.com/JewishWorld/JewishNews/Article.aspx?id=191782
2010

Henry Adams photo
Moshe Chaim Luzzatto photo
Arthur Sullivan photo

“After all we [have] each of us only eight notes to work upon.”

Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900) English composer of the Gilbert & Sullivan duo

Quoted in Thomas F. Dunhill Sullivan's Comic Operas: A Critical Appreciation (London: Edward Arnold, 1928) p. 182.
On being accused of plagiarism.

Joseph Beuys photo
Giorgio Vasari photo
Aung San Suu Kyi photo
Michael T. Flynn photo