Quotes about work

Ninety-five percent of all jobs suck, Jones. That’s why people get paid to do them.

Sydney feels an affinity with Human Resources. She likes the name, with its not-so-hidden implication that employees are an exploitable resource, like stock or real estate. And not a particularly valuable one, despite that old chestnut about employees being the company’s most important asset. Sydney knows the truth: give the company cash resources, give it strategic partnerships, give it inventory; give it anything but prickly, unreliable, idiosyncratic humans. People are the worst: you can’t stack them, or (easily) relocate them, and you can’t even just leave them alone to accumulate value. That’s why the company requires HR: a department to transform humans into resources.

The Infrastructure Control manager is a short, muscular man with a dark beard. He is an oddity in Zephyr Holdings: a person who started on the floor and was promoted through hard work. This makes other managers uncomfortable. The idea that you can get ahead through sheer competence, and not politicking, backstabbing, fleeing impending disasters, and clambering on board imminent successes, undermines everything they know.

The easier your job, the more you got paid. John had suspected this for many years, but here was the proof: pulling down five hundred bucks an hour to sit in the afternoon sun on top of an L.A. office tower. He was wearing a suit and shades, reclining on a deck chair while a light breeze blew in from the bay. John thought he might have found the perfect job.

I learned pretty early in my career as an agent to be friendly to utter jerks; it’s an essential skill.

To get a good job in marketing, you need to market yourself.

The house was not built by its owner. It was erected, decorated, and furnished by innumerable workers — in the timber yard, the brick field, and the workshop, toiling for dear life at a minimum wage.

What we do want is so to arrange things that every human being born into the world shall be ensured the opportunity in the first instance of learning some useful occupation, and of becoming skill in it; next, that he shall be free to work at his trade without asking leave of master or owner, and without handing over to landlord or capitalist the lion's share of what he produces.

Millions of human beings have labored to create this civilization on which we pride ourselves today. Other millions, scattered through the globe, labor to maintain it. Without them nothing would be left in fifty years but ruins.

In virtue of this monstrous system, the son of the worker, on entering life, finds no field which he may till, no machine which he may tend, no mine in which he may dog, without accepting to leave a great part of what he will produce to a master.

To emancipate woman is not only to open the gates of the university, the law courts, or the parliaments, for her, for the "emancipated" woman will always throw domestic toil on to another woman. To emancipate woman is to free her from the brutalizing toil of kitchen and washhouse; it is to organize your household in such a way as to enable her to rear her children, if she be so minded, while still retaining sufficient leisure to take her share of social life.

It will come to pass. As we have said, things are already improving. Only let us fully understand that a revolution, intoxicated with the beautiful words Liberty, Equality, Solidarity would not be a revolution if it maintained slavery at home. Half humanity subjected to the slavery of the hearth would still have to rebel against the other half.

There are, it seems, two Muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say, “It is yet more difficult than you thought.” This is the muse of form. The first muse is the one mainly listened to in a cheap-energy civilization, in which “economic health” depends on the assumption that everything desirable lies within easy reach of anyone. To hear the second muse one must move outside the cheap-energy enclosure. It is the willingness to hear the second muse that keeps us cheerful in our work. To hear only the first is to live in the bitterness of disappointment.