Quotes about work

Our governments are preparing for a future without work, and that includes the petty criminals. Leisure societies lie ahead of us. … People will still work — or, rather, some people will work, but only for a decade of their lives. They will retire in their late thirties, with fifty years of idleness in front of them. … But how do you energize people, give them back some sense of community? A world lying on its back is vulnerable to any cunning predator. Politics are a pastime for a professional caste and fail to excite the rest of us. Religious belief demands a vast effort of imaginative and emotional commitment, difficult to muster if you're still groggy from last night's sleeping pill. Only one thing is left which can rouse people, threaten them directly and force them to act together. … Crime, and transgressive behavior — by which I mean all activities which aren't necessarily illegal, but provoke us and tap our need for strong emotion, quicken the nervous system and jump the synapses deadened by leisure and inaction.

No man can succeed in a line of endeavor which he does not like. The most essential step in the marketing of personal services is that of selecting an occupation into which you can throw yourself wholeheartedly. p. 87

There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use.

I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.

“Still, I am restless; in all my life I have achieved nothing.”

“Work and fatigue are well-known cures for restlessness! And what is achievement after all? Another name for vanity!”

If the dictators and militarists who used to start wars had to earn by manual labor what their wars cost, there would have been very few wars.

I am not a manual labourer and please God I shall never be one, but there are some kinds of manual work that I could do if I had to. At a pinch I could be a tolerable road-sweeper or an inefficient gardener or even a tenth-rate farm hand. But by no conceivable amount of effort or training could I become a coal-miner; the work would kill me in a few weeks.

It is so with all types of manual work; it keeps us alive, and we are oblivious of its existence. In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an 'intellectual' and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior.

This business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept waiting about, of having to do everything at other people's convenience, is inherent in working-class life. A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive role. He does not act, he is acted upon. He feels himself the slave of mysterious authority and has a firm conviction that 'they' will never allow him to do this, that, and the other.

In such places as these a woman is only a poor drudge muddling among an infinity of jobs. She may keep up her spirits, but she cannot keep up her standards of cleanliness and tidiness. There is always something to be done, and no conveniences and almost literally not room to turn round. No sooner have you washed one child's face than another is dirty; before you have washed the crocks from one meal the next is due to be cooked.

Time, and Industry, produce everyday new knowledge.

Kilgore's Creed: "You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do."