Best Hard Labor Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“Work was intended not to give a man a reason to live, but rather to give him a means to live.”

Source: Healology

“Oh, without the brigade one could still somehow manage to survive the camp! Without the brigade you are an individual, you yourself choose your own line of conduct. Without the brigade you can at least die proudly, but in the brigade the only way they allow you even to die is in humiliation, on your belly. From the chief, from the camp foreman, from the jailer, from the convoy guard, from all of them you can hide and catch a moment of rest; you can ease up a bit here on hauling, shirk a bit there on lifting. But from the driving belts, from your comrades in the brigade, there is neither a hiding place, nor salvation, nor mercy. You cannot not want to work. You cannot, conscious of being a political [prisoner], prefer death from hunger to work. No! Once you have been marched outside the compound, once you have been registered as going out to work, everything the brigade does today will be divided not by twenty-five but by twenty-six, and because of you the entire brigade's percentage of norm will fall from 123 to 119, which makes the difference between the ration allotted to record breakers and ordinary rations, and everyone will lose a millet cake and three and a half ounces of bread. And that is why your comrades keep watch on you better than any jailers! And the brigade leader's fist will punish you far more effectively than the whole People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Now that is what spontaneous initiative in re-education means! That is psychological enrichment of the personality by the collective!”

Communism Prison Life 1974 1933 Hard Labor The Archipelago Metastasizes

Book:The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV

Source: The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV

“I spent the last Friday of summer vacation spreading hot, sticky tar across the roof of George Washington High. My companions were Dopey, Toothless, and Joe, the brain surgeons in charge of building maintenance. At least they were getting paid. I was working forty feet above the ground, breathing in sulfur fumes from Satan's vomitorium, for free. Character building, my father said. Mandatory community service, the judge said. Court-ordered restitution for the Foul Deed. He nailed me with the bill for the damage I had done, which meant I had to sell my car and bust my hump at a landscaping company all summer. Oh, and he gave me six months of meetings with a probation officer who thought I was a waste of human flesh. Still, it was better than jail. I pushed the mop back and forth, trying to coat the seams evenly. We didn't want any rain getting into the building and destroying the classrooms. Didn't want to hurt the school. No, sir, we sure didn't.”

Wit Community Service Hard Labor Boy Narrator

Book:Twisted

Source: Twisted

“Today, the world rewards those with creative and intellectual muscles. So, women and skinny men need to shut up and start thinking.”

Ideas Creativity Intellect Hard Labor

Book:The Confessions of a Misfit

Source: The Confessions of a Misfit

“The reason why camps proved economically profitable had been foreseen as far back as Thomas More, the great-grandfather of socialism, in his Utopia. The labor of the zeks was needed for degrading and particularly heavy work, which no one, under socialism, would wish to perform. For work in remote and primitive localities where it would not be possible to construct housing, schools, hospitals, and stores for many years to come. For work with pick and spade—in the flowering of the twentieth century. For the erection of the great construction projects of socialism, when the economic means for them did not yet exist.”

Utopia 1974 Hard Labor Prison Labor For Profit Prisons We Are Building

Book:The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV

Source: The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV

“The hardest chore to do, and to do right, is to think. Why do you think the common man would choose labor, partially, as a distraction from his own thoughts? It is because that level of stress, he most absolutely abhors.”

Source: Healology