Quotes about worker (1058 quotes, page 2)

“Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm in London, March 1850

“Dr. King understood that peace without justice was no peace at all; that aligning our reality with our ideals often requires the speaking of uncomfortable truths and the creative tension of non-violent protest. But he also understood that to bring about true and lasting change, there must be the possibility of reconciliation; that any social movement has to channel this tension through the spirit of love and mutuality. If he were alive today, I believe he would remind us that the unemployed worker can rightly challenge the excesses of Wall Street without demonizing all who work there; that the businessman can enter tough negotiations with his company’s union without vilifying the right to collectively bargain. He would want us to know we can argue fiercely about the proper size and role of government without questioning each other’s love for this country -- (applause) -- with the knowledge that in this democracy, government is no distant object but is rather an expression of our common commitments to one another. He would call on us to assume the best in each other rather than the worst, and challenge one another in ways that ultimately heal rather than wound.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2011, Remarks at a Dedication Ceremony for the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Memorial (October 2011)

Love , Truth , Peace , Justice

“We keep countless men from being good citizens by the conditions of life by which we surround them. We need comprehensive workman’s compensation acts, both State and national laws to regulate child labor and work for women, and, especially, we need in our common schools not merely education in book-learning, but also practical training for daily life and work. We need to enforce better sanitary conditions for our workers and to extend the use of safety appliances for workers in industry and commerce, both within and between the States. Also, friends, in the interest of the working man himself, we need to set our faces like flint against mob-violence just as against corporate greed; against violence and injustice and lawlessness by wage-workers just as much as against lawless cunning and greed and selfish arrogance of employers.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, The New Nationalism (1910)

Life , Women , Men , Books

“Overcapitalization in all its shapes is one of the prime evils; for it is one of the most fruitful methods by which unscrupulous men get improper profits, and when the holdings come into innocent hands we are forced into the uncomfortable position of being obliged to reduce the dividends of innocent investors, or of permitting the public and the wage-workers, either or both, to suffer. Such really effective control over great inter-State business can come only from the National Government. The American people demands the new Nationalism needful to deal with the new problems; it puts the National need above sectional, or personal advantage; it is impatient of the utter confusion which results from local legislatures attempting to treat National issues as local issues; it is still more impatient of the National impotence which springs from the over-division of governmental powers; the impotence which makes it possible for local selﬁshness, or for the vulpine legal cunning which is hired by wealthy special interests, to bring National activities to a deadlock; The control must be exercised in several different ways. It may be that National incorporation is not at the moment possible; but there must be some affirmative. National control, on terms which will secure publicity in the affairs of and complete supervision and control over the big, Nation-wide business corporations; a control that will prevent and not legalize abuses. […] Such control should protect and favor the corporation which acts honestly, exactly as it should check and punish, when it cannot prevent, every species of dishonesty.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, The Progressives, Past and Present (1910)

Men , People , Way , Exercises

“Whom do I hate most among the rabble of today? The socialist rabble, the chandala apostles, who undermine the instinct, the pleasure, the worker’s sense of satisfaction with his small existence–who make him envious, who teach him revenge. The source of wrong is never unequal rights but the claim of “equal” rights.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Antichrist

Sec. 57
The Antichrist (1888)

Hate , Pleasure , Revenge , Sense

“For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician's own failings.
And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2008, A More Perfect Union (March 2008)

Life , Women , Men , People

“It is an essential part of our social tragedy that people, like farmers, the industrial workers, the medical profession, etc., influence the social process not only by their work, but also — and even predominantly — by political ideologies.”

Wilhelm Reich book The Mass Psychology of Fascism

Section 3 : Work Democracy versus Politics. The Natural Social Forces for the Mastery of the Emotional Plague
The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), Ch. 10 : Work Democracy
Context: It is an essential part of our social tragedy that people, like farmers, the industrial workers, the medical profession, etc., influence the social process not only by their work, but also — and even predominantly — by political ideologies. For political activity hampers objective, rational activity; it splits professional organizations into warring ideological groups; it disorganizes the industrial workers: it restricts the work of the physician and harms the patients, etc. In brief, political activity prevents precisely what it pretends to achieve: peace, work, security, international cooperation, objective expression of opinion, freedom of belief, etc.

People , Parting

“The interest of research workers has frequently been focused on the phenomenon of regularly shaped crystals suddenly forming from a liquid”

Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) German theoretical physicist

The Development of Quantum Mechanics (1933)
Context: The interest of research workers has frequently been focused on the phenomenon of regularly shaped crystals suddenly forming from a liquid, e. g. a supersaturated salt solution. According to the atomic theory the forming force in this process is to a certain extent the symmetry characteristic of the solution to Schrödinger's wave equation, and to that extent crystallization is explained by the atomic theory. Nevertheless this process retains a statistical and — one might almost say — historical element which cannot be further reduced: even when the state of the liquid is completely known before crystallization, the shape of the crystal is not determined by the laws of quantum mechanics. The formation of regular shapes is just far more probable than that of a shapeless lump. But the ultimate shape owes its genesis partly to an element of chance which in principle cannot be analysed further.

“Business men, professional men, and wage workers alike must understand that there should be no question of their enjoying any rights whatsoever unless in the fullest way they recognize and live up to the duties that go with those rights. This is just as true of the corporation as of the trade-union, and if either corporation or trade-union fails heartily to acknowledge this truth, then its activities are necessarily anti-social and detrimental to the welfare of the body politic as a whole. In war time, when the welfare of the nation is at stake, it should be accepted as axiomatic that the employer is to make no profit out of the war save that which is necessary to the efficient running of the business and to the living expenses of himself and family, and that the wageworker is to treat his wage from exactly the same standpoint and is to see to it that the labor organization to which he belongs is, in all its activities, subordinated to the service of the nation.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, Address to the Knights of Columbus (1915)
Context: Again, every citizen should be trained sedulously by every activity at our command to realize his duty to the nation. In France at this moment the workingmen who are not at the front are spending all their energies with the single thought of helping their brethren at the front by what they do in the munition plant, on the railroads, in the factories. It is a shocking, a lamentable thing that many of the trade-unions of England have taken a directly opposite view. I am not concerned with whether it be true, as they assert, that their employers are trying to exploit them, or, as these employers assert, that the labor men are trying to gain profit for those who stay at home at the cost of their brethren who fight in the trenches. The thing for us Americans to realize is that we must do our best to prevent similar conditions from growing up here. Business men, professional men, and wage workers alike must understand that there should be no question of their enjoying any rights whatsoever unless in the fullest way they recognize and live up to the duties that go with those rights. This is just as true of the corporation as of the trade-union, and if either corporation or trade-union fails heartily to acknowledge this truth, then its activities are necessarily anti-social and detrimental to the welfare of the body politic as a whole. In war time, when the welfare of the nation is at stake, it should be accepted as axiomatic that the employer is to make no profit out of the war save that which is necessary to the efficient running of the business and to the living expenses of himself and family, and that the wageworker is to treat his wage from exactly the same standpoint and is to see to it that the labor organization to which he belongs is, in all its activities, subordinated to the service of the nation.

Men , War , Truth , Family

“The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself”

Karl Marx book Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Estranged Labour, p. 30.
Paris Manuscripts (1844)
Context: The fact that labour is external to the worker, i. e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.

Feeling

“What I want from all my lovers is real, unadulterated love, and from my genuine workers I expect real work done.”

Meher Baba (1894–1969) Indian mystic

What Baba Means by Real Work (1954)
Context: What I want from all my lovers is real, unadulterated love, and from my genuine workers I expect real work done.
I want also to draw your attention to the fact that miracles experienced by my devotees and admirers, both in the East and in the West, have been attributed to me. On the basis of my Divine Honesty I tell you that in this Incarnation I have not, up till now, consciously performed a single miracle. Whenever a miracle has been attributed to me, it has always been news to me. What I wish to emphasize is that by attributing such miracles to me, people cheapen and lower my status as the Highest of the High. But today I do say this, that the moment I break my silence and utter the Original Word, the first and last miracle of "BABA" will be performed. And, when I perform that Miracle, I shall not raise the dead, but shall make those who live for the world, dead to the world and live in God. I shall not give sight to the blind, but make people blind to illusion and make them see God as Reality.

Love , Lovers

“We wish to control big business so as to secure among other things good wages for the wage-workers and reasonable prices for the consumers.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

Speech at Progressive Party Convention, Chicago http://www.ssa.gov/history/trspeech.html (17 June 1912)
1910s
Context: We wish to control big business so as to secure among other things good wages for the wage-workers and reasonable prices for the consumers. Wherever in any business the prosperity of the businessman is obtained by lowering the wages of his workmen and charging an excessive price to the consumers we wish to interfere and stop such practices. We will not submit to that kind of prosperity any more than we will submit to prosperity obtained by swindling investors or getting unfair advantages over business rivals.

Business

“It is not only highly desirable but necessary that there should be legislation which shall carefully shield the interests of wage-workers, and which shall discriminate in favor of the honest and humane employer by removing the disadvantage under which he stands when compared with unscrupulous competitors who have no conscience and will do right only under fear of punishment.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1900s, The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900), National Duties
Context: No hard-and-fast rule can be laid down as to where our legislation shall stop in interfering between man and man, between interest and interest. All that can be said is that it is highly undesirable, on the one hand, to weaken individual initiative, and, on the other hand, that in a constantly increasing number of cases we shall find it necessary in the future to shackle cunning as in the past we have shackled force. It is not only highly desirable but necessary that there should be legislation which shall carefully shield the interests of wage-workers, and which shall discriminate in favor of the honest and humane employer by removing the disadvantage under which he stands when compared with unscrupulous competitors who have no conscience and will do right only under fear of punishment. Nor can legislation stop only with what are termed labor questions. The vast individual and corporate fortunes, the vast combinations of capital, which have marked the development of our industrial system create new conditions, and necessitate a change from the old attitude of the state and the nation toward property.

Fear

“Because workers can organize and ordinary people have a voice, American democracy has given our people the opportunity to pursue their dreams and enjoy a high standard of living.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2016, Remarks to the People of Cuba (March 2016)
Context: There’s still enormous problems in our society. But democracy is the way that we solve them. That's how we got health care for more of our people. That's how we made enormous gains in women’s rights and gay rights. That's how we address the inequality that concentrates so much wealth at the top of our society. Because workers can organize and ordinary people have a voice, American democracy has given our people the opportunity to pursue their dreams and enjoy a high standard of living.

People , Dreams , Democracy

“Under present-day conditions it is necessary to have corporations in the business world as it is to have organizations, unions, among wage workers.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1900s, Address at Providence (1901)
Context: Where men are gathered together in great masses it inevitably results that they must work far more largely through combinations than where they live scattered and remote from one another… Under present-day conditions it is necessary to have corporations in the business world as it is to have organizations, unions, among wage workers.

World , Business

“Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers!”

Salvador Allende (1908–1973) Chilean physician and politician

Final address (1973)
Context: The people must defend themselves, but they must not sacrifice themselves. The people must not let themselves be destroyed or riddled with bullets, but they cannot be humiliated either.
Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Keep in mind that, much sooner than later, great avenues will again be opened, through which will pass the free man, to construct a better society.
Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers!
These are my last words, and I am certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain, I am certain that, at the very least, it will be a moral lesson that will punish felony, cowardice, and treason.

People

“What young generations have done before you should give you hope. It was young folks like you who marched and mobilized and stood up and sat-in to secure women’s rights, and voting rights, and workers’ rights, and gay rights, often against incredible odds, often over the course of years, sometimes over the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime. Even if their rights were already secured, they fought to secure those rights and opportunities for others. What they did should give you hope.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2013, Commencement Address at Ohio State University (May 2013)
Context: I lost my first race for Congress, and look at me now – I’m an honorary graduate of The Ohio State University!
The point is, in your life, you will fail. You will stumble, and you will fall. But that will make you better. You’ll get it right the next time. And that’s not only true for your personal pursuits, but for the broader causes you believe in as well. But don’t give up. Don’t lose heart, or grow cynical. The cynics may be the loudest voices – but they accomplish the least. It’s the silent disruptors – those who do the long, hard, committed work of change – that gradually push this country in the right direction, and make the most lasting difference.
Still, whenever you feel that creeping cynicism; whenever you hear those voices say you can’t make that difference; whenever somebody tells you to set your sights lower – the trajectory of America should give you hope. What young generations have done before you should give you hope. It was young folks like you who marched and mobilized and stood up and sat-in to secure women’s rights, and voting rights, and workers’ rights, and gay rights, often against incredible odds, often over the course of years, sometimes over the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime. Even if their rights were already secured, they fought to secure those rights and opportunities for others. What they did should give you hope.
And where we’re going should give you hope. Because while things are still hard for a lot of people, you have every reason to believe that your future is bright.

Women , Hope

“If machines are going to take jobs away from the worker, then he will need to find something else to do. Perhaps he'll get back to the soil. But we must care for him during the period of change. We must keep him away from Red literature, Red ruses; we must see that his mind remains healthy.”

Al Capone (1899–1947) American gangster

Literature , Change

“I wanted to document, somehow, the strength of those people that I had known . . . when the migrant worker was living without any kind of protection.”

Tomás Rivera (1935–1984) American academic

On his novel . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra (as quoted in “Tomás Rivera: December 22, 1935–May 16, 1984” https://www.humanitiestexas.org/programs/tx-originals/list/tomas-rivera)

People

“The overthrow of communism gave a green light to the unbridled exploitative impulses of Western corporate interests. No longer needing to convince workers that they live better than their counterparts in Russia, and no longer constrained by a competing system, the corporate class is rolling back the many gains that working people in the West have won over the years. Now that the free market, in its meanest form, is emerging triumphant in the East, so will it prevail in the West.”

Michael Parenti (1933) American academic

Source: Blackshirts and Reds (1997), p. 58

Light , People , Communication

“It could and must, be explained that in the civil war we destroyed the White Guards in order that they should not destroy the workers. Consequently, our problem is not the destruction of human life, but its preservation. But as we have to struggle for the preservation of human life with arms in our hands, it leads to the destruction of human life - a puzzle the dialectical secret of which was explained by old Hegel, without reckoning other still more ancient sages.”

Leon Trotsky book Terrorism and Communism

Source: Terrorism and Communism (1920), Chapter three, p. 53

War , Secret , Problem , Life

“We are socialists because we see the social question as a matter of necessity and justice for the very existence of a state for our people, not a question of cheap pity or insulting sentimentality. The worker has a claim to a living standard that corresponds to what he produces. We have no intention of begging for that right… Since the political powers of the day are neither willing nor able to create such a situation, socialism must be fought for. It is a fighting slogan both inwardly and outwardly. It is aimed domestically at the bourgeois parties and Marxism at the same time, because both are sworn enemies of the coming workers’ state. It is directed abroad at all powers that threaten our national existence and thereby the possibility of the coming socialist national state.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

“Those Damn Nazis: Why Are We Socialists?” https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/haken32.htm written by Joseph Goebbels and Mjölnir, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken, Nazi propaganda pamphlet (Munich: Verlag Frz. Eher, 1932)
1930s

Time , Justice , Question , People

“As we were very much pressed for time we were unable to see as much of the jail as we wanted to. We had an impression that we had been shown the brighter side of jail life. Nonetheless, two facts stood out. One was that we had actually seen desirable and radical improvements over the old system prevailing even now in most countries and the second and even more important fact was the mentality of the prison officials, and presumably the higher officials of the government also, in regard to jails. Actual conditions may or may not be good but the general principles laid down for jails are certainly far in advance of anything we had known elsewhere in practice. Anyone with a knowledge of prisons in India and of the barbarous way in which handcuffs, fetters and other punishments are used will appreciate the difference. The governor of the prison in Moscow who took us round was all the time laying stress on the human side of jail life, and how it was their endeavour to keep this in the front and not to make the prisoner feel in any way dehumanised or outcasted. I wish we in India would remember this wholesome principle and practise it in our daily lives even outside jail…. It can be said without a shadow of doubt that to be in a Russian prison is far more preferable than to be a worker in an Indian factory, whose lot is 10 to 11 hours work a day and then to live in a crowded and dark and airless tenement, hardly fit for an animal. The mere fact that there are some prisons like the ones we saw is in itself something for the Soviet Government to be proud of.”

Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) Indian lawyer, statesman, and writer, first Prime Minister of India

Soviet Russia: Some Random Sketches and Impressions (1949)

Time , Country , Animals , Knowledge

“But the privation, especially of the upper and middle-class peasantry, was very great, and often it seemed that the whole ambitious scheme would collapse, and perhaps carry the Soviet Government with it. It required immense courage to hold on. Many prominent Bolsheviks thought that the strain and suffering caused by the agricultural programme were too great and there should be a relaxation. But not so Stalin. Grin-fly and silently he held on. He was no talker, he hardly spoke in public. He seemed to be the iron image of an inevitable fate going ahead to the predestined goal. And something of his courage and determination spread among the members of the Communist Party and other workers in Russia.”

Jawaharlal Nehru book Glimpses of World History

Glimpses of World History (1949)

Courage , Flying , Suffering , Fate

“This Five Year Plan had been drawn up after the most careful thought and investigation. The whole country had been surveyed by scientists and engineers, and numerous experts had discussed the problem of fitting in one part of the programme into another. For, the real difficulty came in this fitting in… But Russia had one great advantage over the capitalist countries. Under capitalism all these activities are left to individual initiative and chance, and owing to competition there is waste of effort. There is no co-ordination between different producers or different sets of workers, except the chance co-ordination which arises in the buyers and sellers coming to the same market… The Soviet Government had the advantage of controlling all the different industries and activities in the whole Union, and so it could draw up and try to work a single co-ordinated plan in which every activity found its proper place. There would be no waste in this, except such waste as might come from errors of calculation or working, and even such errors could be rectified far sooner with a unified control than otherwise.”

Jawaharlal Nehru book Glimpses of World History

Glimpses of World History (1949)

Drawing , Chance , Country , Problem

“Apart from its effect on the war, the Revolution was in itself a tremendous event, unique in world history. Although it was the first revolution of its kind, it may not long remain the only one of its type, for it has become a challenge to other countries and an example for many revolutionaries all over the world… The March Revolution had been a spontaneous unorganized one, the November one had been carefully planned out. For the first time in history the representatives of the poorest classes, and especially of the industrial workers, were at the head of a country.”

Jawaharlal Nehru book Glimpses of World History

Glimpses of World History (1949)

Time , History , Country , War

“Russia today is a Soviet country, and its government is run by representatives of the workers and peasants. In some ways it it the most advanced country in the world. Whatever actual conditions may be, the whole structure of government and society is based on the principle of social equality.”

Jawaharlal Nehru book Glimpses of World History

Glimpses of World History (1949)

World , Way , Country

“When communist workmen associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need - the need for society - and what appears as a means becomes an end. You can observe this practical processing its most splendid results whenever you see French socialist workers together. Such things as smoking, drinking, eating, etc., are no longer means of contact or means that bring together. Company, association, and conversation, which again has society as its end, are enough for them; the brotherhood of man is on mere phase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies.”

Karl Marx book Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

"The Meaning of Human Requirements"
Source: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p.99-100,The Marx-Engels Reader

Drink , Life , Appearance , Time

“From the moment he arrived in Chile, the poverty, misery, and the anguish of the poor deeply affected him. Such was the situation he observed throughout the Valparaíso area. He lived very modestly, eating what the poor ate, living from his earnings as a French teacher. During the harvest season, he joined the humble farm workers working with them, and worked as an unskilled laborer.”

Antonio Llidó (1936–1974) Spanish priest

Statements made by Fr. Jesus Rodriguez in an interview with Memory and Justice Chile Organisation on June 19, 2003. http://www.memoriayjusticia.cl/english/en_focus-llido.html#A%20Priest.

Season , Teachers

“We are socialists because we see the social question as a matter of necessity and justice for the very existence of a state for our people, not a question of cheap pity or insulting sentimentality. The worker has a claim to a living standard that corresponds to what he produces.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

1930s, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken (1932)

People , Justice , Question

“The bourgeois is about to leave the historical stage. In its place will come the class of productive workers, the working class, that has been up until today oppressed. It is beginning to fulfill its political mission. It is involved in a hard and bitter struggle for political power as it seeks to become part of the national organism. The battle began in the economic realm; it will finish in the political.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

1930s, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken (1932)

Parting

“The worker in a capitalist state — and that is his deepest misfortune — is no longer a living human being, a creator, a maker.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

1930s, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken (1932)

“This knowledge will not fall from heaven; it will be acquired only by those who have the mind and the will to study, as Marx required of his first disciples. Wilhelm Liebknecht’s little volume of reminiscences will be an aid and stimulus in this direction. It ought to have a place on the bookshelf of every revolutionary worker.”

James P. Cannon (1890–1974) American politician

"Marx, the Man" (1930)

Knowledge , Study

“Workers must form worker-run cooperatives. Then we can buy goods and services only from worker-run cooperatives, and that would end global sweatshop slavery.”

Richard D. Wolff (1942) American economist

Global Capitalism Monthly Update (12 March 2014)

“…And I was only concerned about the migrant worker, the people I had known best. I had been a migrant worker. So I began to see that my role—if I want to call it that—would be to document that period of time, but giving it some kind of spiritual strength or spiritual history.”

Tomás Rivera (1935–1984) American academic

On writing about migrant workers (as quoted in “CUANDO LLEGUEMOS/WHEN WE ARRIVE: THE PARADOX OF MIGRATION IN TOMAS RIVERA'S "... Y NO SE LO TRAGO LA TIERRA" https://www.jstor.org/stable/25745215?seq=1)

Time , People , History

“The fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.”

Karl Marx book Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
Estranged Labour, p. 30.

Feeling , Nature

“The development of fixed capital indicates in still another respect the degree of development of wealth generally, or of capital…
The creation of a large quantity of disposable time apart from necessary labour time for society generally and each of its members (i.e. room for the development of the individuals’ full productive forces, hence those of society also), this creation of not-labour time appears in the stage of capital, as of all earlier ones, as not-labour time, free time, for a few. What capital adds is that it increases the surplus labour time of the mass by all the means of art and science, because its wealth consists directly in the appropriation of surplus labour time; since value directly its purpose, not use value. It is thus, despite itself, instrumental in creating the means of social disposable time, in order to reduce labour time for the whole society to a diminishing minimum, and thus to free everyone’s time for their own development. But its tendency always, on the one side, to create disposable time, on the other, to convert it into surplus labour...
The mass of workers must themselves appropriate their own surplus labour. Once they have done so – and disposable time thereby ceases to have an antithetical existence – then, on one side, necessary labour time will be measured by the needs of the social individual, and, on the other, the development of the power of social production will grow so rapidly that, even though production is now calculated for the wealth of all, disposable time will grow for all. For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time. Labour time as the measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty, and disposable time as existing in and because of the antithesis to surplus labour time; or, the positing of an individual’s entire time as labour time, and his degradation therefore to mere worker, subsumption under labour. The most developed machinery thus forces the worker to work longer than the savage does, or than he himself did with the simplest, crudest tools.”

Karl Marx book Grundrisse

Grundrisse (1857-1858)
Source: Notebook VII, The Chapter on Capital, pp. 628–629.

Time , Wealth , Art , Appearance

“We must begin with ourselves: bishops and priests, who should not feel themselves superior to our brothers and sisters in the people of God. Pastoral workers, who should not understand service as power.”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

2020s, 2022
Source: "God does not want ‘a world governed by religious laws,’ pope tells Canadian clergy" https://religionnews.com/2022/07/28/god-does-not-want-a-world-governed-by-religious-laws-pope-tells-canadian-clergy/, 28 July 2022

God , Understanding , People , Feeling

“The vision is really about empowering workers giving them all the information about what’s going on so they can do a lot more than they’ve done in the past.”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

Past

“By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh book Gift from the Sea

Gift from the Sea (1955)

Time

“You go to work the next day pretending nothing happened.
Your co-workers ask
if everything's okay and you tell them
you're just tired.
And you're trying to smile. And they're trying to smile.”

Richard Siken (1967) American poet

Smile

“We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.”

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

1960s, Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)
Context: I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

Men , God , Hate , People

“If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.”

John Cleese (1939) actor from England

As quoted in Best New Games (2002) by Dale N. LeFevre, p. 9

Time

“The one conclusion I have reached is that whiskey is a great leveler. You might be a hotshot advertising executive or a lowly foundry worker, but if you cannot hold your drink, you are just a drunkard.”

Vikas Swarup book Q & A

Source: Q & A

Drink

“The way of the miracle-worker is to see all human behavior as one two things: either love, or a call for love.”

Marianne Williamson (1952) American writer

Love , Way , Behavior

“Worker bees can leave.
Even drones can fly away.
The Queen is their slave.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

Bee , Flying

“It feels like the whole world has turned upside down. There aren't any more rules.

Hey,' I say to Sam, because if the world's gone crazy, then I guess I can do whatever I want. "Guess what? I'm a worker.”

Holly Black book White Cat

Source: White Cat

World , Feeling

“We asked for workers. We got people instead.”

Max Frisch (1911–1991) Swiss playwright and novelist

People

“If there is ever a fascist takeover in America, it will come not in the form of storm troopers kicking down doors but with lawyers and social workers saying. "I'm from the government and I'm here to help.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

Source: Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

Help

“Saying my story makes me want to change it, make it sound pretty the way I do with the stories I tell the workers. I'd like it to have a beginning as grand as a ball and an ending in a whisper, like a mother tucking in a child for sleep.”

Shannon Hale The Goose Girl

Source: The Goose Girl

Way , Sleep , Change

“The world is not moved only by the mighty shoves of the heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

World

“The regulative principles of management along scientific lines include four important elements:
(a) Planning of the processes and operations in detail by a special department organized for this purpose.
(b) Functional organization by which each man superintending the workman is responsible for a single line of effort. This is distinctly opposed to the older type of military organization, where every man in the management is given a combination of executive, legislative and judicial functions.
(c) Training the worker so as to require him to do each job in what has been found to be the best method of operation.
(d) Equable payment of the workers based on quantity and quality of output of each individual. This involves scientific analysis of each operation to determine the proper time that should be required for its accomplishment and also high payment for the worker who obtains the object sought.”

Hugo Diemer (1870–1937) American mechanical engineer

(1921, p. 10); Diemer quotes the ASCM committee
Factory organization and administration, 1910

Effort , Time , Training

“A number of students denounce state intervention and the loss of university autonomy. This student sector reflects its class background while forgetting its revolutionary obligation. This sector has not realized that it has an obligation to workers and peasants. Our workers and peasants died beside the students in order to attain power.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Speech to University students (1959)

Universe , Loss , Forgetting

“The Leader of the Future 2 is divided into five parts. In Part One, our book begins where it should, with Peter Drucker’s vision of leadership… Part Two, "Leading in a Diverse World," begins with the recognized world authority on building a learning organization. "Systems Citizenship" presents MIT’s Peter Senge at his best, as he challenges us to understand systems, implement systems intelligence, and build partnerships that are a mandate for the new millennium… Part Three, "Leading in a Time of Crisis and Complexity," begins with Ron Heifetz of Harvard’s Kennedy School. Ron describes new approaches to solving leadership dilemmas as he challenges leaders in "Anchoring Leadership in the Work of Adaptive Progress"… Part Four, "Leading Organizations of the Future," shows how changing context has an impact leadership needs, demanding changes in leadership styles. Charles Handy is one of the great social philosophers of our time… Part Five, "The Quality and Character of the Leader of the Future," begins with one of the most influential thought leaders in history, Stephen Covey. In "Leading in the Knowledge Worker Age."”

Marshall Goldsmith (1949) American author of leadership and management literature

Source: The leader of the future 2, 2006, p. xiv-xvii; preview

Books , Age , World , School

“At the great Washington March of 1963, the chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, John Lewis, speaking to the same enormous crowd that heard Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream," was prepared to ask the right question: "Which side is the federal government on?" That sentence was eliminated from his speech by organizers of the March to avoid offending the Kennedy Administration. But Lewis and his fellow SNCC workers had experienced, again and again, the strange passivity of the national government in the face of Southern violence, strange, considering how often this same government had been willing to intervene outside the country, often with overwhelming force.
John Lewis and SNCC had reason to be angry. John had been beaten bloody by a white mob in Montgomery as a Freedom Rider in the spring of 1961. The federal government had trusted the notoriously racist Alabama police to protect the Riders, but done nothing itself except to have FBI agents take notes. Instead of insisting that blacks and whites had a right to ride the buses together, the Kennedy Administration called for a "cooling-off period," a moratorium on Freedom Rides.”

Howard Zinn (1922–2010) author and historian

You Can't Be Neutral on A Moving Train (1994) Ch. 4: "My Name is Freedom": Albany, Georgia

Dreams , Spring , Question , Freedom

“From the Nordic perspective, it’s not this Nordic approach that is unsustainable—it’s the American approach that’s eventually going to implode. For in the United States more than half of fast-food workers rely on some form of public assistance to get by, meaning that American taxpayers are actually subsidizing the fast-food industry in the United States, to the tune of billions of dollars per year. If we’re hunting for countries practicing socialism, the United States appears to be a pretty strong contender.”

Anu Partanen (1975) journalist

Source: The Nordic Theory of Everything, Chapter 8

Food , Strong , Appearance , Country

“All of that to gain a piece of paper, that minimally guarantees a job of stability, a job where one follows a daily routine and gets a monthly salary, and a job, in my opinion, of sheer boredom and unhappiness. And they with the piece of paper, claiming that they have faired better in their lives, compared to fellow hawkers and construction workers. But I retort, at least they didn’t spend up to 10 years in a place they didn’t like, filling their brains with knowledge they never wanted. Some people say it’s a life they want, not for me. Some people they say it is worth going to school for over 10 years for such a life, no it isn’t.”

Amos Yee (1998) blogger

Tumblr postings

Life , People , School , Knowledge

“Tsar Nicholas the Bloody, who has dispersed the First and Second Dumas, who has drowned Russia in blood, enslaved Poland and Finland, and is in alliance with out — and-out reactionaries conducting a policy of stifling the Jews and all “aliens”, the tsar whose loyal friends shot down the workers on the Lena and ruined the peasants to the point of starvation all over Russia — that tsar pretends to be the champion of Slav independence and freedom!"”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Collected Works, Vol. 41, pp. 262–66
Collected Works

Freedom

“The vanguard of industrial investment in the world capitalist system is in the lowest paid segment of those countries paying the lowest wages. Young women in developing countries are the labor force on this frontier just as women and children were in the industrialization of England and Europe in the nineteenth century. Escaping the patriarchal restrictions of domestic production, young women workers are segregated in the new industrial compounds where they are subject to the patriarchal control of managers.”

June Nash (1927–2019) American anthropologist

Source: Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor, 1983, p. x

Women , Children , World , Country

“It's coming soon and soon, mother, it's nearer every day,
When only men who work and sweat will have a word to say;
When all who earn their honest bread in every land and soil
Will claim the Brotherhood of Man, the Comradeship of Toil;
When we, the Workers, all demand: `What are we fighting for?”

Robert W. Service Ballads of a Bohemian

. . .
Then, then we'll end that stupid crime, that devil's madness -- War."
Ballads of a Bohemian (1921), Michael

Men , War , Stupidity , Fight

“He sees things from every point of view. He's an extraordinarily hard worker. I think he's worked for a long time, in every field. He's talented, passionate and has had an incredibly hard and full life that I'm sure you know about. I can not imagine myself having some of his experiences. You either swim or drown, but some like him go on and make every moment important. I think that's what he does.”

Nastassja Kinski (1961) German actress

On Roman Polanski, as quoted in Nastassja Kinski: June 2004 Interview with Tony Bray http://www.nastassja-kinski.jp/article/tvnow_jun04/index.html

Life , Imagination , Thinking , Passion

“He's a meticulously hard worker and yet he'll roam the grass of his farm for hours and sometimes for days before he can bring himself to put a word on paper.”

Oscar Hammerstein II (1895–1960) American librettist, theatrical producer, and (usually uncredited) theatre director of musicals

Richard Rodgers, quoted in Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein II, 2007-12-12, 2004 http://c250.columbia.edu/c250_celebrates/remarkable_columbians/rodgers_hammerstein.html,
About

Grass

“While we can doubtless look to some wide changes in the shapes of social relationships as a result of contemporary libertarian movements, and especially to an increase in workers' involvement in decision-making at the place of work and in the development of forms of democracy more direct and more sensitive to modern conditions, it is unlikely that the general outcome will be the wholly non-governmental society of which libertarians now and in the past have dreamed. The value of anarchism is likely to remain primarily in its force as an inspiring idea, an activating vision…”

George Woodcock (1912–1995) Canadian writer of political biography and history, an anarchist thinker, an essayist and literary critic

Postscript (July 1973)
Anarchism : A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (1962)

Dreams , Democracy , Idea , Decision

“The factors that are rarely instrumental in bringing about high job attitudes focus not on the job itself but rather on the characteristics of the context in which the job is done: working conditions, interpersonal relationships, supervision, company policies, administration of these policies, effects on the worker's personal life, job security, and salary. This is a basic distinction. The satisfiers relate to the actual job. Those factors that do not act as satisfiers describe the job situation.”

Frederick Herzberg (1923–2000) American psychologist

Source: The motivation to work, 1959, p. 63

Life , Personality

“In primitive society, where uniformity of occupation is the rule, and the distribution of the community into various classes of workers has hardly begun, every man is more or less his own magician; he practices charms and incantations for his own good and the injury of his enemies.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 5, The Magical Control of the Weather.

Communication

“The labor should include rest breaks so that the worker has time to recover from fatigue. Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type. The man who is mentally alert and intelligent is for this very reason entirely unsuited to what would, for him, be the grinding monotony of work of this character. Therefore the workman who is best suited to handling pig iron is unable to understand the real science of doing this class of work.”

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

Source: Principles of Scientific Management, 1911, p. 59.

Stupidity , Intelligence , Understanding , Science

“At Wal-Mart, a co-worker once advised me that, although I had a lot to learn, it was also important not to "know too much," or at least never to reveal one's full abilities to management, because "the more they think you can do, the more they'll use you and abuse you." My mentors in these matters were not lazy; they just understood that there are few or no rewards for heroic performance. The trick lies in figuring out how to budget your energy so there'll be some left over for the next day.”

Barbara Ehrenreich (1941) American writer and journalist

Evaluation (p. 195)
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America (2001)

Thinking , Learning

“We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. It's pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor,…have no health care—that's the most expensive single element in making a car— have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south…when [Mexico's] jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it's leveled again. But in the meantime, you've wrecked the country with these kinds of deals.”

Ross Perot (1930–2019) American businessman

1992 Presidential Debate, regarding the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Transcript http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/16/us/the-1992-campaign-transcript-of-2d-tv-debate-between-bush-clinton-and-perot.html

Money , Health , Cars , Country

“The leader may be chosen by the people, but he is guided by the right; and, in the same way, we may say that the worker may be employed by anyone, but that he is directed by the autonomous ideal in the task.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 76.

People , Way

“When the strike started in 1965, most of our friends forsook us for a while. They ran — or were just too busy to help. But the California Migrant Ministry held a meeting with its staff and decided that the strike was a matter of life or death for farm workers everywhere, and that even if it meant the end of the Migrant Ministry they would turn over their resources to the strikers. The political pressure on the Protestant Churches was tremendous and the Migrant Ministry lost a lot of money. But they stuck it out, and they began to point the way to the rest of the Church. In fact, when 30 of the strikers were arrested for shouting Huelga [Strike], 11 ministers went to jail with them.”

Cesar Chavez (1927–1993) American farm worker, labor leader, and civil rights activist

The Mexican-American and the Church (1968)

Life , Death , Money , Way

“The guts of honey bee workers contain a distinctive community of bacterial species. They are microaerophilic or anaerobic, and were not clearly deliniated by earlier studies relying on laboratory culture of isolates under atmospheric oxygen levels. Recently, a more complete picture of the potential metabolism and functions of these bacteria have been possible, using genomic approaches based on metagenomic samples, as well as cultured isolates. Of these, most are host-restricted and are generally absent outside adult guts.”

Nancy A. Moran (1954) American biologist

[Current Opinion in Insect Science, 10, August 2015, 22–28, Genomics of the honey bee microbiome, 10.1016/j.cois.2015.04.003]

Communication , Study , Bee

“I never believed, as many Marxists professed to do, that normative principles were irrelevant to the socialist movement, that, since the movement was of oppressed people fighting for their own liberation, there was no room or need for specifically moral inspiration in it. I thought no such thing partly for the plain reason that I observed enormous selfless dedication among the active communists who surrounded me in my childhood, and partly for the more sophisticated reason that the self-interest of any oppressed producer would tell him to stay at home, rather than to risk his neck in a revolution whose success or failure would be anyhow unaffected by his participation in it. Revolutionary workers and, a fortiori, bourgeois fellow-travellers without a particular material interest in socialism, must perforce be morally inspired.”

Gerald Cohen (1941–2009) Canadian philosopher

G. A. Cohen, Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality https://books.google.com/books?id=oeUQjOLNY-wC&pg=PA3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3

People , Travel , Home , Failure

“The Capitalist system with its exploitation of those who are economically weak, with its robbery of the workers labour power, with its unethical way of appraising human beings by the number of things and the amount of money he possesses, instead of by their internal value and their achievements, must be replaced by a new and just economic system, in a word by German Socialism.”

Gregor Strasser (1892–1934) German politician, rival of Adolf Hitler inside the Nazi Psrty

Tradition & Revolution: Collected Writings of Troy Southgate, editors: Patrick Boch, Jacob Christiansen and John B. Morgan, UK, Arktos Media (2010) p. 66.

Money , Way

“The worker is no longer the slave to his reproductive urge. He is a free bargaining agent who enters the market to dispose of the one commodity he commands — labor power — and if he gets a rise in wages he will not be so foolish as to squander it in a self-defeating proliferation of his numbers.
The capitalist faces him in the arena. His greed and lust for wealth are caustically described in those chapters that leave the abstract world for a look into 1860 England. But it is worth noting that he is not money hungry from mere motives of rapacity; he is an owner-entrepreneur engaged in an endless race against his fellow owner-entrepreneurs; he must strive for accumulation, for in the competitive environment in which he operates, one accumulates or one gets accumulated.
The stage is set and the characters take their places. But now the first difficulty appears. How, asks Marx, can profits exist in such a situation? If everything sells for its exact value, then who gets an unearned increment?”

Robert L. Heilbroner book The Worldly Philosophers

Source: The Worldly Philosophers (1953), Chapter VI, Karl Marx, p. 148

Money , World , Motivation , Appearance

“[Describing her visit to a slaughter facility in Pennsylvania] The floor was very slippery and the walls and everything else were covered with blood. Dried blood had formed a crust on the chains. I surely didn't want to fall down in all that blood and guts. The workers wore non-slip boots, yellow aprons, and helmets. It was a scene of controlled, mechanized chaos.”

Sue Coe (1951) British artist

Dead Meat, as quoted in A Plea for the Animals by Matthieu Ricard (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2016), p. 78 https://books.google.it/books?id=bTLuDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA78.

“Throughout all the years and in everything we do, we have focused most of all on the development of human capacity, beginning with our own professional staff, and leveraging their expertise to enrich the Arab community. We have embraced the concept of the ‘knowledge worker’ and have sought to empower our people and the Arab world’s people to dream, to imagine, and to create.”

Talal Abu-Ghazaleh (1938) Jordanian businesspeople

People , World , Dreams , Imagination

“He had assumed that if you removed a human being’s natural incentive to work—his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy—and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But no careless workers kept those lovely farmlands, or made the superb cars and comfortable trains. The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 3 (p. 82)

Love , Cars , Motivation , Nature

“Hitler did not have Mussolini's revolutionary socialist background… Nevertheless, he shared the socialist hatred and contempt for the 'bourgeoisie' and 'capitalism' and exploited for his purposes the powerful socialist traditions of Germany. The adjectives 'socialist' and 'worker' in the official name of Hitler's party ('The Nationalist-Socialist German Workers' Party') had not merely propagandistic value… On one occasion, in the midst of World War II, Hitler even declared that 'basically National Socialism and Marxism are the same.”

Richard Pipes (1923–2018) American historian

Source: Property and Freedom (1999), p. 220

War , World

“Can’t you approach the young worker and tell him that the way to live is to work for life and not for death? Is it beneath American scholars to try to do that?… Your only salvation is in carrying the idea of socialism to the working class and coming back to storm—to storm, yes, to storm—the bastions of capitalism.”

Isaac Deutscher (1907–1967) British historian

Isaac Deutscher, quoted in S. Unger, "Deutscher and the New Left in America", in D. Horowitz (ed).

Life , Death , Way , Idea

“The approach that dominates organizational theory, teaching, and practice for most of the twentieth century looked at organizations from the top-down, starting with a view of the CEO as the "leader" who shapes the organization's strategy, structure, culture, and performance potential. The nature of work and the role of the workforce enter the analysis much later, after considerations of technology and organization design have been considered. However, if the key source of value in the twenty-first-century organization is to be derived from the workforce itself, an inversion of the dominant approach will be needed. The new perspective will start not at the top of the organization, but at but at the front lines, with people and the work itself — which is where value is created. Such an inversion will lead to a transformation in the management and organization of work workers, and knowledge.”

Thomas A. Kochan (1947) American academic

Source: "Beyond McGregor’s Theory Y", 2002, p. 2: introduction; Republished in: Douglas McGregor. The Human Side of Enterprise 1960/2006. p. 366

People , Nature , Knowledge

“Every discipline develops standards of professional competence to which its workers are subject… Every scientific community is a society in the small, so to speak, with its own agencies of social control.”

Abraham Kaplan (1918–1993) American philosopher

Source: "The Conduct of Inquiry", p. 4.

Communication

“Tolstoy, while sympathizing with the industrial workers, believed that they ought not to organize in trade unions and he opposed strenuously nearly every form of action advocated by working-class organizations.”

Robert Hunter (author) (1874–1942) American sociologist, author, golf course architect

Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 72

“The attack of the Luddites was not occasioned by the introduction of new machinery, however, as is commonly thought, for there is no evidence of such in 1811 and 1812 when Luddism proper began. Rather, the destruction was leveled at the new slip-shod methods which were ordered into effect on the extant machinery. Not an attack against production on economic grounds, it was above all the violent response of the textile workers (soon joined by others) to their attempted degradation in the form of inferior work; shoddy goods — the hastily-assembled "cut-ups," primarily — was the issue at hand.”

John Zerzan (1943) American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author

Source: Elements of Refusal (1988), p. 108

“Even bold and revolutionary thinkers bow to the judgment of science. Kropotkin wants to break up all existing institutions, but he does not touch science. Ibsen goes very far in his critique of bourgeois society, but he retains science as a measure of truth. Levi Strauss has made us realize that Western thought is not the lonely peak of human achievement it was once thought to be, but he and his followers exclude science from their relativization of ideologies. Marx and Engels were convinced that science would aid the workers in their quest for mental and social liberation.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Science in a Free Society

pg 75.
Science in a Free Society (1978)

Truth , Science

“My first encounter with the concept of "information service" came with the reading of The Social Function of Science by Desmond Bernal, first published in 1939-a work that stimulated a whole generation of young scientists to think about the role of science in society, its organisation, its future. In it, he wrote that in every laboratory "there should be someone deputed to watch the whole of current literature for items which might be relevant to the work of the laboratory, and to be able to indicate without loss of time where such items are likely to be found." Such a person "would have to be chosen partly for his comprehensive scientific interests, which need to be much greater than those of the other laboratory workers, and partly for his inclination to systematic thinking." Already I felt that I might be suited to such a role.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: A Long Search for Information (2004), p. 4.

Literature , Thinking , Science , Loss

“Because it calls itself the Conservative party; if it called itself the Socialist Workers' Party, I wouldn't have anything against it. It's egalitarian, it's opposed to the maintenance to the married family, which is the absolute pillar of morale and social conservatism. It's opposed to national independence, completely wedded to our membership of the supranational European Union which robs us of sovereignty. It's got much more in common with the SWP than it has with Conservatism.”

Peter Hitchens (1951) author, journalist

2015-09-14
Owen Jones meets Peter Hitchens
Owen Jones meets...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrwuk6NoMv8
On his hostility to the Conservative Party

Family , Wedding

“They are arrayed against every principle for which we stand. So when the Soviet leaders jail a writer, or a priest, or a doctor or a worker, for the crime of speaking freely, it is not only for humanitarian reasons that we should be concerned. For these acts reveal a regime that is afraid of truth and liberty; it dare not allow its people to enjoy the freedoms we take for granted, and a nation that denies those freedoms to its own people will have few scruples in denying them to others. If detente is to progress then it ought to mean that the Soviet authorities relax their ruthless opposition to all forms and expressions of dissent.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Chelsea Conservative Association (26 July 1975) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/102750
Leader of the Opposition

People , Truth , Freedom

“Workers, peasants, we are
The great party of labourers.
The earth belongs only to men;
The idle will go to reside elsewhere.
How much of our flesh have they consumed?
But if these ravens, these vultures
Disappear one of these days,
The sun will still shine forever.”

Eugène Edine Pottier (1816–1887) French politician

Ouvriers, paysans, nous sommes
Le grand parti des travailleurs
La terre n'appartient qu'aux hommes
L'oisif ira loger ailleurs
Combien de nos chairs se repaissent
Mais si les corbeaux, les vautours
Un de ces matins disparaissent
Le soleil brillera toujours.
The Internationale (1864)

Men , Sun

“This "scorched earth" directive was followed the next day, on March 23 by an equally monstrous order by Martin Bormann, the Fuehrer's secretary. Speer described it on the stand at Nuremberg: "The Bormann decree aimed at bringing the population to the center of the Reich from both East and West, and the foreign workers and prisoners of war were to be included. These millions of people were to be sent upon their trek on foot. No provisions for their existence had been made, nor could it be carried out in view of the situation. It would have resulted in an unimaginable hunger catastrophe.”

William L. Shirer book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960)

Hunger , War , People

“The pivotal struggle which must be waged in the ranks of the working class is consequently the open, unreserved battle against entrenched racism. The white worker must become conscious of the threads which bind him to a James Johnson, Black auto worker, member of UAW, and a political prisoner presently facing charges for the killings of two foremen and a job setter. The merciless proliferation of the power of monopoly capital may ultimately push him inexorably down the very same path of desperation. No potential victim of the fascist terror should be without the knowledge that the greatest menace to racism and fascism is unity!”

Angela Davis (1944) American political activist, scholar, and author

If They Come in The Morning (1971)

Knowledge

“This assemblage is exceedingly good to look upon. I wish it were possible for me to give you what you are giving me this afternoon. What I say here amounts to but little; what I see here is exceedingly important. You workers in Ohio, enlisted in the greatest cause ever organized in the interest of your class, are making history today in the face of threatening opposition of all kinds—history that is going to be read with profound interest by coming generations.”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

The Canton, Ohio Speech, Anti-War Speech (1918)

History , Reading

“The greatest danger to the British Empire and to the British people is not to be found among the enormous fleets and armies of the European Continent, nor in the solemn problems of Hindustan; it is not in the 'Yellow Peril' nor the 'Black Peril' nor any danger in the wide circuit of colonial and foreign affairs. No, it is here in our midst, close at home, close at hand in the vast growing cities of England and Scotland, and in the dwindling and cramped villages of our denuded countryside. It is there you will find the seeds of Imperial ruin and national decay—the unnatural gap between rich and poor, the divorce of the people from the land, the want of proper discipline and training in our youth, the exploitation of boy labour, the physical degeneration which seems to follow so swiftly on civilized poverty, the awful jumbles of an obsolete Poor Law, the horrid havoc of the liquor traffic, the constant insecurity in the means of subsistence and employment which breaks the heart of many a sober, hard-working man, the absence of any established minimum standard of life and comfort among the workers, and, at the other end, the swift increase of vulgar, joyless luxury—here are the enemies of Britain. Beware lest they shatter the foundations of her power.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The People's Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 139-140
Early career years (1898–1929)

Life , People , Youth , Law

“Marx may have erred in analyzing the nature of this conflict. Interests of workers and capitalists may not be irreconcilable under all circumstances, and workers may see the choice between capitalism and socialism differently depending upon the specific political and economic conditions under which they live.”

Adam Przeworski (1940) Polish-American academic

Adam Przeworski and Michael Wallerstein, The American Political Science Review (Jun., 1982)

Nature , Dependency

“The central thing I learned was that reformism was a rational strategy for workers. It was in the interest of workers to support capitalist democracy. An electoral victory of pure workers’ parties was not historically feasible, because the assumption that manual workers in industry and transportation would one day become the overwhelming majority of the population in industrializing countries was mistaken.”

Adam Przeworski (1940) Polish-American academic

interview by Gerardo Munck on February 24, 2003, published in Passion, Craft, and Method in Comparative Politics edited by Gerardo L. Munck and Richard Snyder

Democracy , Support , Learning , Victory

“When we use the term pig, for example, we are referring to the people who systematically violate the peoples' constitutional rights- whether they be monopoly capitalists or police. The term is now being adopted by radicals, hippies, and minority peoples. Even the workers, when the pigs supported strike-breakers like they did as Union Oil where 100 local police came in a cracked strikers' heads, began to call them by their true name.”

Bobby Seale (1936) American activist

Interview with The Guardian (February 1970)

People , Support

“From the moment when the workers of our country and of Russia began to struggle bravely against the Czarist Government and the capitalist exploiters, we notice more and more often that the priests, in their sermons, come out against the workers who are struggling. It is with extraordinary vigour that the clergy fight against the socialists and try by all means to belittle them in the eyes of the workers. The believers who go to church on Sundays and festivals are compelled, more and more often, to listen to a violent political speech, a real indictment of Socialism, instead of hearing a sermon and obtaining religious consolation there. Instead of comforting the people, who are full of cares and wearied by their hard lives, who go to church with faith in Christianity, the priests fulminate against the workers who are on strike, and against the opponents of the government; further, they exhort them to bear poverty and oppression with humility and patience. They turn the church and the pulpit into a place of political propaganda.”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

Socialism and the Churches (1905)

People , Faith , Fight , Patience

“When the economy is in a depression, scarcity ceases to rule. Productive resources sit idle, so that it is possible to have more of some things without having less of others; free lunches are all around. As a result, all the usual rules of economics are stood on their head; we enter a looking-glass world in which virtue is vice and prudence is folly. Thrift hurts our future prospects; sound money makes us poorer. Moreover, that's the kind of world we have been living in for the past several years, which means that it is a kind of world that students should understand. […] Depression economics is marked by paradoxes, in which seemingly virtuous actions have perverse, harmful effects. Two paradoxes in particular stand out: the paradox of thrift, in which the attempt to save more actually leads to the nation as a whole saving less, and the less-well-known paradox of flexibility, in which the willingness of workers to protect their jobs by accepting lower wages actually reduces total employment. […] In times of depression, the rules are different. Conventionally sound policy – balanced budgets, a firm commitment to price stability – helps to keep the economy depressed. Once again, this is not normal. Most of the time we are not in a depression. But sometimes we are – and 2013, when this chapter was written, was one of those times.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

“Depressions are Different”, in Robert M. Solow, ed. Economics for the Curious: Inside the Minds of 12 Nobel Laureates. 2014.

Money , World , Understanding , Time

“Sport carries on without deviation the mechanical tradition of furnishing relief and distraction to the worker after he has finished his work proper so that he is at no time independent of one technique or another. In sport the citizen of the technical society finds the same spirit, criteria, morality, actions and objectives—in short, all the technical laws and customs—which he encounters in office or factory.”

Jacques Ellul book The Technological Society

Source: The Technological Society (1954), p. 384

Law , Sport , Time

“Workers of all lands, unite — to smash the rule of English capitalism! You young upward-striving nations of the earth, combine to annihilate the old English dragon who blocks the treasures of the earth and withholds from you the riches of the world.”

Robert Ley (1890–1945) Nazi politician

Quoted in Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler - Page 140 by Peter Robert Edwin Viereck, Peter Viereck - Political Science - 2004

World

“In the absence of truth there is no necessity, and this observation may serve as an index to the position of the modern egotist. Having become incapable of knowing, he becomes incapable of working, in the sense that all work is a bringing of the ideal from potentiality into actuality. … The modern worker does not, save in rare instances, respond to the ideal in the task.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 73.

Truth , Sense

Quotes about worker page 2

Quotes about worker
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