Top 100 Tom Hodgkinson Quotes
#1. We have become so obsessed by numbers and by bottom lines that beauty and truth has been knocked aside.
Tom Hodgkinson
#2. I've found that there isn't any correlation whatsoever between the hours put in and the quality of what comes out. Most of the Beatles' songs probably originated in about five minutes.
Tom Hodgkinson
#3. What I've found in working less is you start to get a bit more involved in the more real politics, which is local politics that affect what's going on in your own community.
Tom Hodgkinson
#4. One aspect of fast London life I have never understood, for example, is the custom of the gym. Why do people go to gyms?
Tom Hodgkinson
#5. We can live frugally. The less you work, the less you spend and the more time you have for loafing about. But when I put forward this simple notion, I was greeted with a volley of resentment.
Tom Hodgkinson
#7. I count it as a certainty that in paradise, everyone naps.
Tom Hodgkinson
#8. When walking, you see things that you miss in a motor car or on the train. You give your mind space to ponder.
Tom Hodgkinson
#9. I'm not sure if I could bear to go on an aeroplane again. It's not my concern for the welfare of the planet. It's not even the long check-in times and queuing. No, it's the humiliation of the security process that has finally done it for me.
Tom Hodgkinson
#10. Thus it is that the Internet, once heralded as an exciting new medium of communication, is now little more than a vast mail-order catalogue.
Tom Hodgkinson
#11. The terrible thing about the Internet and Amazon is that they take the magic and happy chaos out of book shopping. The Internet might give you what you want, but it won't give you what you need.
Tom Hodgkinson
#12. I suddenly realised, hey, I'm not a lazy idiot, I'm an idler! It's something to aspire to, it's part of the creative process! That's fantastic!
Tom Hodgkinson
#13. Our dreams take us into other worlds, alternative realities that help us make sense of day-to-day realities.
Tom Hodgkinson
#15. Labour-saving devices just make us try to cram more pointless activities into each day, rather than doing the important thing, which is to enjoy our life.
Tom Hodgkinson
#16. Alongside my 'no email' policy, I resolve to make better use of the wonderful Royal Mail, and send letters and postcards to people. There is a huge pleasure in writing a letter, putting it in an envelope and sticking the stamp on it. And huge pleasure in receiving real letters, too.
Tom Hodgkinson
#17. [W]e should be mucking about all the time, because mucking about is enjoying life for its own sake, now, and not in preparation for an imaginary future. It's obvious that the mirth-filled man, the cheerful soul, the childish adult is the one who has least to fear from life.
Tom Hodgkinson
#18. I've often said that far more sensible than a 'make poverty history' campaign would be a 'make wealth history' campaign. It is, after all, the wealthy people who do all the damage. The less money you earn, the fewer resources you use up.
Tom Hodgkinson
#19. Life has been reduced to a series of long periods of boredom in the office punctuated by high-octane "experiences" which you can rack up on your list of things to do before you die. That's not really living: that is slavery with the occasional circus thrown in.
Tom Hodgkinson
#20. Life is becoming no more than staring at the screen.
Tom Hodgkinson
#21. Both on an individual and a national scale, debt imprisons.
Tom Hodgkinson
#22. If you want health, wealth and happiness, the first step is to throw away your alarm clocks!
Tom Hodgkinson
#23. If your work is done on the phone, then surely you can set up some kind of wireless system. If your work involves reading or writing reports, then this too could be done outside.
Tom Hodgkinson
#24. Pain will never leave us. Instead of putting energy into destroying pain, we need to put energy into creating pleasure.
Tom Hodgkinson
#25. I think it's good to look at how people lived before, and then take the best bits of that culture and try to mix it in with your own.
Tom Hodgkinson
#26. Computers tend to separate us from each other - Mum's on the laptop, Dad's on the iPad, teenagers are on Facebook, toddlers are on the DS, and so on.
Tom Hodgkinson
#27. Idleness allows you to turn a situation from boredom to pleasure.
Tom Hodgkinson
#28. We have a job. A job! Our reward after years of education! We worked hard in our youth in order to work hard again in our adulthood. A job! The summit of our lives!
Tom Hodgkinson
#29. Whether you live in the city or in the country, creating time for a leisurely ramble is an easy thing to do.
Tom Hodgkinson
#30. When we are busy at work and busy at home, an hour's walking every day becomes a real luxury. If done alone, the walk injects a period of meditation into the day, and if done in company, it allows space for some really good conversation.
Tom Hodgkinson
#31. I seethe at the humiliation of airport security checks.
Tom Hodgkinson
#32. What is required as we travel towards full unemployment is not new legislation but a gradual change of mental attitude, a shift in values. As our taste for idling grows, we will refuse to work for old-fashioned bosses who demand a five-day, 40-hour, nine-to-five type week, or worse.
Tom Hodgkinson
#33. In this age of getting what you want and getting it now, the simple pleasure of browsing is often forgotten.
Tom Hodgkinson
#34. Festivals are fun for kids, fun for parents and offer a welcome break from the stresses of the nuclear family. The sheer quantities of people make life easier: loads of adults for the adults to talk to and loads of kids for the kids to play with.
Tom Hodgkinson
#35. It's pretty obvious that Western lifestyles which rely on gigantic amounts of electricity use up far more resources than a subsistence-based life. A little more poverty would be a good thing.
Tom Hodgkinson
#36. Often, the things that a lot of work has gone into have been incredibly bad because they're over-worked.
Tom Hodgkinson
#37. Bosses should sanction the nap rather than expect workers to power on all day without repose. They might even find that workers' happiness - or what management types refer to as 'employee satisfaction results' - might improve.
Tom Hodgkinson
#38. Idleness for me is not a giving up on life but a spirited grabbing hold of it.
Tom Hodgkinson
#39. Truly, the bench is a boon to idlers. Whoever first came up with the idea is a genius: free public resting places where you can take time out from the bustle and brouhaha of the city, and simply sit and watch and reflect.
Tom Hodgkinson
#40. It is while prone that ideas come. "A writer could get more ideas for his articles or his novels in this posture than he could by sitting doggedly before his desk morning and afternoon," writes Lin Yutang in his essay "On Lying in Bed.
Tom Hodgkinson
#41. The myth suggests to us that a "good job" will offer us ample money, a social life, status and work which we will find "rewarding." It's actually astonishing how little we pause to reflect on these terms when at school or college.
Tom Hodgkinson
#42. There's nothing new about anti-work philosophy. History is dotted with individuals and groups who decided that laziness was next to godliness and work was a waste of time.
Tom Hodgkinson
#43. To me there is no more depressing sight than a five-year-old staring at a screen, unsmiling, mouse in hand. Besides whatever dreadful things this prolonged exposure to screens is doing to their brains, computer games tend to be solitary affairs, and produce little laughter.
Tom Hodgkinson
#44. I don't put much faith in the political system because it's a question of how are you going to run capitalism, not how are we going to develop a different system to capitalism.
Tom Hodgkinson
#45. Of all the depressing abuses of language in business, there is none that gets me so incensed as the rampant overuse of the word 'passionate' in company slogans, marketing blurbs, mission statements and on the sides of vans.
Tom Hodgkinson
#47. Faffing, of course, does not fit the programme. We are supposed to be busy, productive citizens.
Tom Hodgkinson
#48. In both word and deed, one of the greatest idlers of all time was John Lennon. In his songs we see repeated defences of simply lying around doing nothing.
Tom Hodgkinson
#49. How much better life would be if we began the day with a poem rather than the empty prattle of newspapers, with their diet of fear, hate, envy and jealousy.
Tom Hodgkinson
#50. Sensible people advise against drinking on an empty stomach, but to my mind it is the best sort of drinking.
Tom Hodgkinson
#51. Being good to people is the only insurance policy you need.
Tom Hodgkinson
#52. There is nothing so perfect as pinball and a pint at 11 a.m.
Tom Hodgkinson
#53. The terrible irony is that when our current job turns out to provide neither much money nor much fun, we think we can solve the problem by getting a better job. So it goes on: an endless cycle, a miserable set-up, as satirized brilliantly in the UK sitcom The Office.
Tom Hodgkinson
#54. Management gurus in general are, I think, best avoided. All too often they reduce your working life to a list of rules to be followed. Targets are aimed at. Goals kicked at. You then break the rules or forget them and, hey presto, you start beating yourself up.
Tom Hodgkinson
#55. The siesta provides a delightful detour from the working day and it also has a practical value as far as productivity is concerned. Winston Churchill had a good long siesta every day during the Second World War, and he said it was the thing that enabled him to cope with the pressure.
Tom Hodgkinson
#56. Education is like pruning ; it wrecks the natural growth of the tree in favour of a form that is useful to commercial society
Tom Hodgkinson
#57. The reason laziness is rarely pushed as a lifestyle option is down to one simple reason: money. There are fortunes to be made out of active lifestyles. Gyms charge fees. But no one is going to make money out of sleep. It is free.
Tom Hodgkinson
#58. Joyful chaos, working in tune with the seasons, telling the time by the sun, variety, change, self-direction; all this was replaced with a brutal, standardized work culture, the effects of which we are still suffering from today.
Tom Hodgkinson
#59. If we are to make life into a pleasure rather than a struggle, then I would suggest that we have to start with our own mental attitudes.
Tom Hodgkinson
#60. It seems no body's business to try to better things
Tom Hodgkinson
#61. My hope is that flexible working and varying shift patterns will give workers a taste for idling and that they will gradually demand greater reductions in the length of the working week.
Tom Hodgkinson
#62. A conclusion I've come to at the Idler is that it starts with retreating from work but it's really about making work into something that isn't drudgery and slavery, and then work and life can become one thing.
Tom Hodgkinson
#63. The job was invented in order to make things easier for those at the top.
Tom Hodgkinson
#64. The best thing that can happen to anybody is to be sacked or made redundant because often that's when you think, "I don't want to become one of the living dead. I haven't got anything to lose, now I can start to follow my own dreams."
Tom Hodgkinson
#65. I've never understood activity holidays since we seem to have far too much activity in our daily lives as it is. Find a culture where loafing is the order of the day and where they don't understand our need to be constantly doing things. Find somewhere you can have a hammock holiday.
Tom Hodgkinson
#66. The way to stop feeling guilty is to read stuff - I'm not saying my book, but works by Bertrand Russell or Oscar Wilde, people who weren't losers but who didn't believe in the work ethic, and argued this thing about guilt or wrote philosophy about idleness.
Tom Hodgkinson
#67. In a world where you are constantly asked to be 'committed,' it is liberating to give yourself the license to be a dilettante. Commit to nothing. Try everything.
Tom Hodgkinson
#68. The world's richest half billion people - that's about seven per cent of the global population - are responsible for fifty per cent of the world's emissions.
Tom Hodgkinson
#69. My idea of childcare at festivals is to sit at a trestle table with an ale while the kids run around and make up their own games.
Tom Hodgkinson
#70. I've given up email. Well, almost. At the weekend I set up one of those auto-reply messages, informing my correspondents that I would no longer be checking my emails, and that instead they might like to call or write, as we used to in the olden days.
Tom Hodgkinson
#71. Part of this individualism is you feel this pressure that you alone have to conquer the world, and if you don't work all the hours God gives then you start feeling really guilty. If you can stop feeling guilty, then I think it's easier to start doing what you want to do.
Tom Hodgkinson
#72. There is a vast gap between the promise of the job and its reality. When we enter the ignoble world of work, we are soon shocked at the humiliations we encounter there.
Tom Hodgkinson
#73. In the West, we have become addicted to work. Americans now work the longest hours in the world. And the result is not health, wealth and wisdom, but rather a lot of anxiety, a lot of ill health and a lot of debt.
Tom Hodgkinson
#74. Doing something you enjoy at times of your own choosing and making a living from it: now tell me, is that work?
Tom Hodgkinson
#75. We have to wonder whether digital technology, rather than making it easier to communicate, is actually doing the opposite. We now sit alone at a keyboard, firing off zeros and ones into the ether. Offices are silent.
Tom Hodgkinson
#76. When people say " I just don't have enough time " they mean " I prioritized something else.
Tom Hodgkinson
#77. It's senseless to think of complaining, since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are .
Tom Hodgkinson
#78. Embrace the faff. Stare out of the window. Bend paperclips. Stand in the middle of the room trying to remember what you came downstairs for. Pace. Drum your fingertips. Move papers around. Hum. Look at the garden.
Tom Hodgkinson
#79. Punk was a protest against work and against boredom. It was a sign of life, a rant, a scream, a rejection of bourgeois morals. But have things improved since then? Arguably, they've got worse.
Tom Hodgkinson
#80. The idea of a government is to create an ordered, willing work force where there's no trouble. I think idlers are generally seen as potentially dangerous because they're asking questions.
Tom Hodgkinson
#81. Long periods of languor, indolence and staring at the ceiling are needed by any creative person in order to develop ideas.
Tom Hodgkinson
#82. No! Be weak! Give up! You can't do everything. Lower your standards. Get friends to come and help you.
Tom Hodgkinson
#83. Poetry, being supremely useless, by its very existence represents a protest against the so-called 'real world' of busy-ness and moneymaking, so we must embrace, salute and support our poets.
Tom Hodgkinson
#84. Take responsibility for our lives and recognize that we choose how we react to situations and that we can choose to be free if we so wish.
Tom Hodgkinson
#85. Coffee is for winners, go-getters, tea-ignorers, lunch-cancellers, early-risers, guilt-ridden strivers, money obsessives and status-driven spiritually empty lunatics. It is an enervating force. We should resist it and embrace tea, the ancient drink of poets, philosophers and meditators.
Tom Hodgkinson
#86. The accusation 'unprofessional' means 'You did not behave like a machine today.
Tom Hodgkinson
#87. The phrase 'work/life balance' encapsulates a depressing outlook.
Tom Hodgkinson
#88. When you go for a walk, take seeds with you, poppies, rainbow chard, rocket. Plant them among the weeds in patches of wasteland. See what happens.
Tom Hodgkinson
#89. Laziness works. And the simple way to incorporate its health benefits into your life is simply to take a nap.
Tom Hodgkinson
#90. Paradoxically, to be truly idle, you also have to be efficient.
Tom Hodgkinson
#91. I could happily lean on a gate all the livelong day, chatting to passers-by about the wind and the rain. I do a lot of gate-leaning while I am supposed to be gardening; instead of hoeing, I lean on the gate, stare at the vegetable beds and ponder.
Tom Hodgkinson
#92. Beauty, pleasure, freedom and plenty of sleep: these are the hallmarks of a successful idler's break. Travel should not be hard work.
Tom Hodgkinson
#93. Beauty feeds us. Anarchy is beauty. We are against the grey people. We want to decorate, like those fantastic Indian lorries which are covered with flowers. Beauty must conquer the lust for order; order is ugliness.
Tom Hodgkinson
#94. If you can find a way to make a living doing something you enjoy, or a range of things that you enjoy, then it can scarcely be called work.
Tom Hodgkinson
#95. Benjamin Franklin and the whole idea of a new attitude to money: "Time is money." He invented that idea. Before that, time wasn't money in the same way; in the medieval age it was regarded as sinful for money to be the object of your life.
Tom Hodgkinson
#96. As the son of a feminist mother, I grew up with the idea that work was a sort of salvation for women as it would give them freedom from the domestic grind. Now it seems work is a form of slavery, undertaken out of apparent compulsion rather than choice.
Tom Hodgkinson
#97. We have an idea that if something we're doing isn't actually earning money, or spending it, then it's completely worthless. But if you start to work less, you can actually start to give more to society, but on a local level.
Tom Hodgkinson
#98. We need to be responsible for ourselves; we must create our own republics. Today we hand over our responsibility to the boss, to the company, to government, and then blame them when everything goes wrong.
Tom Hodgkinson
#100. It will soon be difficult to put up a shelf without a degree in shelf putting up.
Tom Hodgkinson
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