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Workers Quotes

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Workers Quotes

“State ownership and control is not necessarily Socialism - if it were, then the Army, the Navy, the Police, the Judges, the Gaolers, the Informers, and the Hangmen, all would all be Socialist functionaries, as they are State officials - but the ownership by the State of all the land and materials for labour, combined with the co-operative control by the workers of such land and materials, would be Socialism.”

“Formerly, many men dominated women within marriage. Now, despite a much wider acceptance of women as workers, men dominate women anonymously outside the marriage. Patriarchy has not disappeared; it has changed form. In the old form, women were forced to obey an overbearing husband in the privacy of an unjust marriage. In the new form, the working single mother is economically abandoned by her former husband and ignored by a patriarchal society at large.”

“When you consider that God could have commanded anything he wanted--anything!--the Ten [Commandments] have got to rank as one of the great missed moral opportunities of all time. How different history would have been had he clearly and unmistakably forbidden war, tyranny, taking over other people's countries, slavery, exploitation of workers, cruelty to children, wife-beating, stoning, treating women--or anyone--as chattel or inferior beings.”

“All one's work might have been better done; but this is a sort of reflection a worker must put aside courageously if he doesn't mean every one of his conceptions to remain forever a private vision, an evanescent reverie.”

“Every attempt, by whatever authority, to fix a maximum of productive labor by a given worker in a given time is an unjust restriction upon his freedom and a limitation of his right to make the most of himself in order that he may rise in the scale of the social and economic order in which he lives. The notion that all human beings born into this world enter at birth into a definite social and economic classification, in which classification they must remain permanently through life, is wholly false and fatal to a progressive civilization.”

“Be true to the best you know. This is your high ideal. If you do your best, you cannot do more. Do your best every day and your life will gradually expand into satisfying fullness. Cultivate the habit of doing one thing at a time with quiet deliberateness. Always allow yourself a sufficient margin of time in which to do your work well. Frequently examine your working methods to discover and eliminate unnecessary tension. Aim at poise, repose, and self-control. The relaxed worker accomplishes most.”

“Hitler did not have Mussolini's revolutionary socialist background... Nevertheless, he shared the socialist hatred and contempt for the 'bourgeoisie' and 'capitalism' and exploited for his purposes the powerful socialist traditions of Germany. The adjectives 'socialist' and 'worker' in the official name of Hitler's party ('The Nationalist-Socialist German Workers' Party') had not merely propagandistic value... On one occasion, in the midst of World War II, Hitler even declared that 'basically National Socialism and Marxism are the same.'”

“Immigration reform is important in our country. We have a lot of employers over on the beaches that rely upon workers and especially in this high-growth environment, where are you going to get people to work to clean our hotel rooms or do our landscaping? We don't need to put those employers in a position of hiring undocumented and illegal workers.”

“I was more than anything a radical. I was more sympathetic to Malcolm X than Martin Luther King because Malcolm X was more of a radical who was willing to confront discrimination in ways that I thought it should be confronted, including perhaps the use of violence. But I really just wanted to be left alone. I thought some laws, like minimum-wage laws, helped poor people and poor black people and protected workers from exploitation. I thought they were a good thing until I was pressed by professors to look at the evidence.”

“The new industries are brainy industries and so-called knowledge workers tend to like to be near other people who are the same. Think of the City of Hollywood. People cluster. This means you have winning regions, such as London and Cambridge, and losing regions. The people who want to be top lawyers in Sunderland are hoovered up by London.”

“We know what we want. To us it means nothing that there is a Soviet Union somewhere in the world, for the sake of whose peace and tranquility the workers of Germany and China were sacrificed to Fascist barbarians by Stalin. We want revolution here in Spain, right now, not maybe after the next European war. We are giving Hitler and Mussolini far more worry with our revolution than the whole Red Army of Russia. We are setting an example to the German and Italian working class on how to deal with Fascism.”

“Yesterday, two firefighters with the Florida Division of Forestry were killed while working on the Blue Ribbon Fire in Florida. On behalf of the 3,500 firefighters on the Wallow Fire and all of us in the firefighting community, our heartfelt condolences go out to their families and their co-workers. “If Prometheus was worthy of the wrath of heaven for kindling the first fire upon earth, how ought all the gods honor those who make it their professional business to put it out?”

“But can we please stop insisting that if low-wage workers earn a little bit more, unemployment will skyrocket and the economy will collapse? There is no evidence for it. The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics is not the claim that if the rich get richer, everyone is better off. It is the claim made by those who oppose any increase in the minimum wage that if the poor get richer, that will be bad for the economy. This is nonsense.”

“You know, the cure for all this talk is really a good dose of incompetent government. You get that alternative and you'll never put Singapore together again: Humpty Dumpty cannot be put together again... my asset values will disappear, my apartments will be worth a fraction of what they were, my ministers' jobs will be in peril, their security will be at risk and their women will become maids in other people's countries, foreign workers.”

“Continue to invest in your personal development. Expand your occupational horizons by constant study . . . look to your present job as a stepping-stone along your career path. Take time to think. The dimensions of most jobs are constrained only by the mind of the uncreative worker. I like what one business man counseled: If at first you do succeed, try something harder!!!”