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Even in the meanest sorts of Labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work.
--
Past and Present.

 

Thomas Carlyle

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...the soul, being a harmony, can never utter a note at variance with the tensions and relaxations and vibrations and other affections of the strings out of which she is composed; she can only follow, she cannot lead them? ...And yet do we not now discover the soul to be doing the exact opposite--leading the elements of which she is believed to be composed; almost always opposing and coercing them in all sorts of ways throughout life... threatening and reprimanding the desires, passions, fears, as if talking to a thing which is not herself...

 

Socrates

 

Early in life, most of us probably observe an unhappy relationship between labor and wealth — to wit, the heavier the labor, the less the wealth.
The man doing heavy manual work makes less than the man who makes a machine work for him, and this man makes less than the man sitting at a desk. The really rich people, the kind who go around on yachts and collect old books and new wives, do no labor at all.
The economic reasons for dividing the money this way are clear enough. One, it has always been done that way; and two, it's too hard to change at this late date. But the puzzling question is why, since the money is parceled out on this principle, young people are constantly being pummeled to take up a life of labor.
In any sensible world, the young would be told they could labor if they wanted to, but warned that if they did so it would cost them.

 

Russell Baker

 

The needs of labor require more than kind words, and are not to be satisfied by such soft phrases as we address to a horse when we want to catch him that we may put a bit in his mouth and a saddle on his back. Let me ask those who are disposed to regard protection as favorable to the aspirations of labor, to consider whether it can be true that what labor needs is to be protected?
To admit that labor needs protection is to acknowledge its inferiority; it is to acquiesce in an assumption that degrades the workman to the position of a dependent, and leads logically to the claim that the employee is bound to vote in the interest of the employer who provides him with work.
There is something in the very word "protection" that ought to make workingmen cautious of accepting anything presented to them under it. The protection of the masses has in all times been the pretense of tyranny — the plea of monarchy, of aristocracy, of special privilege of every kind. The slave owners justified slavery as protecting the slaves.

 

Henry George

 

Work only can keep even kings respectable. And when a king is a king indeed, it is an honorable office to give tone to the manners and morals of a nation; to set the example of virtuous conduct, and restore in spirit the old schools of chivalry, in which the young manhood may be nurtured to real greatness. Work and wages will go together in men's minds, in the most royal institutions. We must ever come to the idea of real work. The rest that follows labor should be sweeter than the rest which follows rest.

 

Albert Pike

 

Mankind is composed of two sorts of men — those who love and create, and those who hate and destroy.

 

Jose Marti