Labor Quotes

“Come my spade. There is no ancient gentlemen but gardeners, ditchers, and grave-makers; they hold up Adam's profession.”

“I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are invited to work; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of action.”

“Mechanic slavesWith greasy aprons, rules, and hammers, shallUplift us to the view.”

“While we are fighting for freedom, we must see, among other things, that labor is free.”

“It is in the interest of the wage-earner to have many other alternatives open to him than service under one all-powerful employer called the State”

“The Earth is given as a common for men to labor and live in.”

“Black men built the railroads, not blue eyes.”

“I have received delegations of working men who, apparently speaking with the utmost sincerity, have declared that they would regard it as a genuine hardship if they were deprived of their beer, for example.”

“When management and labor (employer and employee) both understand they are all on the same side, then each will prosper more.”

“Our ancestors ... were laborers, not lawyers.”

“We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”

“Labor Day, I suppose set by an Act of Congress. Everything we do nowadays is either by, or against, Acts of Congress. How Congress knew anything about Labor is beyond us.”

“Samuel Gompers has spent his life trying to keep labor from working too hard and has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.”

“Labor leaders don't do much laboring after they are able to lead.”

“It's certain there is no fine thing Since Adam's fall but needs much laboring.”

“The more that learn to read the less learn how to make a living. That's one thing about a little education. It spoils you for actual work. The more you know the more you think somebody owes you a living.”

“One-third of the people in the United States promote, while the other two-thirds provide.”

“The American worker is more productive than he's ever been.”

“The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case, He turns his quid of tobacco, while his eyes blur with the manuscript.”

“The ox suffers, the cart complains.”

“Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen, people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.”

“Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.”

“Let the farmer forevermore be honored in his calling; for they who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God.”

“An industrious farmer occupies a more dignified place in the scale of beings...than a lazy lounger...too proud to work, and drawing out a miserable existence by eating on that surplus of other men's labor.”

“Money, when considered as the fruit of many years' industry, as the reward of labor, sweat and toil, as the widow's dowry and children's portion, and as the means of procuring the necessaries and alleviating the afflictions of life, and making old age a scene of rest, has something in it sacred that is not to be sported with, or trusted to the airy bubble of paper currency.”