"If labor mainly, or to any considerable..." - Quote by Henry David Thoreau
If labor mainly, or to any considerable degree, serves the purpose of a police, to keep men out of mischief, it indicates a rottenness at the foundation of our community.
More by Henry David Thoreau
“Simplify, simplify, simplify.”
“Instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.”
“What great interval is there between him who is caught in Africa and made a plantation slave of in the South, and him who is caught in New England and made a Unitarian minister of?”
More on Labor
“A ploughman on his legs is higher than a gentleman on his knees.”
“I hold it to be our duty to see that the wage-worker, the small producer, the ordinary consumer, shall get their fair share of business prosperity. But it either is or ought to be evident to everyone that business has to prosper before anybody can get any benefit from it.”
“Capital and labor are both wild forces which require intelligent legislation to hold them in restriction.”
More on Society
“The rich - they just live in another realm, really.”
“Talk about slavery! It is not the peculiar institution of the South. It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or a tool, and surrenders his inalienable rights of reason and conscience. Indeed, this slavery is more complete than that which enslaves the body alone.”
“Nations have lost their old omnipotence; the patriotic tiedoes not hold. Nations are getting obsolete, we go and live where we will.”