Top 90 Great Labor Quotes
#1. Precious gems are profoundly buried in the earth and can only be extracted at the expense of great labor.
Anandamayi Ma
#2. To me, writing is a considered act. It's something which is a great labor of thought and consideration.
Paul Theroux
#3. If you want it you must obtain it by great labor.
T. S. Eliot
#4. Art begins with resistance - at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.
Andre Gide
#5. For a century or more, the "civilized" world regarded as a manifestation of its wealth metal dug from deep in the ground, refined at great labor, and transported great distances to be buried again in elaborate vaults deep under the ground,
Felix Martin
#6. Abolition of slavery had been the deepest desire and the great labor of my life
Frederick Douglass
#7. Like dogs in a wheel, birds in a cage, or squirrels in a chain, ambitious men still climb and climb, with great labor, and incessant anxiety, but never reach the top.
Robert Browning
#8. It takes great labor to uncover the convincing simple speech of the heart. Poetic candor comes with hard labor, so even does impetuosity and impudence.
Kenneth Rexroth
#9. We have seen that this great labor question cannot be solved save by assuming as a principle that private ownership must be held sacred and inviolable. The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners.
Pope Leo XIII
#10. Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them.
Samuel Johnson
#11. Certainly if we hope do enhance and extend whatever natural assets we were given, we must expect to make an effort, if not actually great labor.
Dixie Carter
#12. The ingredients of health and long life, are great temperance, open air, easy labor, and little care.
Philip Sidney
#13. When you come across real talent, it is sometimes worth allowing them to create the structure in which they choose to labor. In nine cases out of ten, by inviting them to take responsibility and control for a new venture, you will motivate them to do great things.
Felix Dennis
#14. The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#15. Labor rids us of three great evils; tediousness, vice, and poverty.
John Ruskin
#16. The Negro's economic problem was compounded by the emergence and growth of automation. Since discrimination and lack of education confined him to unskilled and semi-skilled labor, the Negro was and remains the first to suffer in these days of great technological development.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#17. It's going to be an emotional time for me to see where my great grandfather ministered. It's going to be great to see the fruit of his labor.
Will Graham
#18. I am very sure that any man of common understanding may, by culture, care, attention, and labor, make himself what- ever he pleases, except a great poet.
Lord Chesterfield
#19. Labor force participation peaked in early 2000, so its decline began well before the Great Recession. A portion of that decline clearly relates to the aging of the baby boom generation. But the pace of decline accelerated with the recession.
Janet Yellen
#20. To me, the labor movement was never just a way of getting higher wages. What appealed to me was the spiritual side of a great cause that created fellowship. You wanted the girl or the man who worked beside you to be treated just as well as you were, and an injury to one was the concern of all.
Rose Schneiderman
#21. In a virtuous government, and more especially in times like these, public offices are what they should be - burdens to those appointed to them which it would be wrong to decline, though foreseen to bring them intense labor and great private loss.
Thomas Jefferson
#22. Moreover, there is an unearned increment on capital and on labor, due to the presence, around the capitalist and the laborer, of a great, industrious, and prosperous society.
William Graham Sumner
#23. This nation, this generation, in this hour has man's first chance to build a Great Society, a place where the meaning of man's life matches the marvels of man's labor.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#24. We labor under the great delusion that we are in control.
Silly humans.
Toni Sorenson
#25. If Russia is to be a great power, it will be, not because of its nuclear potential, faith in God or the president, or Western investment, but thanks to the labor of the nation, faith in knowledge and science and the maintenance and development of scientific potential and education.
Zhores Alferov
#26. We Pashtuns love shoes but don't love the cobbler; we love our scarves and blankets but do not respect the weaver. Manual workers made a great contribution to our society but received no recognition, and this is the reason so many of them joined the Taliban - to finally achieve status and power.
Malala Yousafzai
#27. Every great mind seeks to labor for eternity. All men are captivated by immediate advantages; great minds alone are excited by the prospect of distant good.
Friedrich Schiller
#28. Any one who believes that any great enterprise of an industrial character can be started without labor must have little experience of life.
William Graham Sumner
#29. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars.
George Washington
#30. The collusion of big business, big labor, and big government threaten the spirit of small business that makes America great.
Foster Friess
#31. Nationalism, coupled with great faith in the power of the government to enact domestic bargains between labor and capital, has been seen before: it was called fascism then.
Raghuram G. Rajan
#32. Furthermore, unlike Man's other great good friend the horse, the cat is no sweating serf of Man. The only labor she condescends to perform is to catch mice and rats, and that's fun.
Vance Packard
#33. To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives.
Walter Benjamin
#34. The labor of thinking was so great to me, that having once come to a conclusion upon any subject, I would rather persist in it, right or wrong, than be at the trouble of going over the process again to revise and rectify my judgment.
Maria Edgeworth
#35. Labour day is a great American holiday that people
celebrate by going out and buying products
made in China
David Letterman
#36. There is very little moral mixture in the 'Antislavery' feeling of this country. A great deal is abstract philanthropy; part is hatred of slaveholders; a great part is jealousy for white labor, very little is consciousness of wrong done and the wish to right it.
George William Curtis
#37. In the Great Depression, employment was not low because investment was low. Employment and investment were low because labor market institutions and industrial policies changed in a way that lowered normal employment.
Edward C. Prescott
#38. All animals go through interminable hard labor to produce what humans shamelessly rob from them at great physical/mental pain to them and to their young. THINK TWICE before using hot 'merchandise'!!!
Adela Popescu
#39. I have no more than twenty acres of ground," he replied, "the whole of which I cultivate myself with the help of my children; and our labor keeps off from us the three great evils - boredom, vice, and want.
Voltaire
#40. Dad was a great advocate for social justice and a very quiet advocate of the essential Labor values.
Joan Kirner
#41. The great owners, striking at the immediate thing, the widening government, the growing labor unity; striking at new taxes, at plans; not knowing these things are results, not causes. Results, not causes; results, not causes.
John Steinbeck
#42. Our office ... subjects us to great burdens and labors, dangers and temptations, with little reward or gratitude from the world. But Christ himself will be our reward if we labor faithfully.
Martin Luther
#43. You desire to be learned, wealthy, and great, without labor; it is one of the follies still extant in the world.
George Pope Morris
#44. The labor of rising from the ground will be great, ... but as we mount higher, the earth's attraction, and the body's gravity, will be gradually diminished till we arrive at a region where the man will float in the air without any tendency to fall.
Samuel Johnson
#45. To have been the first woman premier of Victoria was not only a great opportunity but also a great chance to say to the young women of Victoria - Liberal or Labor - 'You can do it, too.'
Joan Kirner
#46. The great advantage to labor arising out of co-operative effort has been apparent to me for many years.
Leland Stanford
#47. Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.
Joseph Joubert
#48. Everyone works because everyone is important." To me this sounded like a great way to spin forced labor.
Demitria Lunetta
#50. Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Albert Einstein
#51. I count him a great man who inhabits a higher sphere of thought, into which other men rise with labor and difficulty; he has but to open his eyes to see things in a true light, and in large relations; whilst they must make painful corrections, and keep a vigilant eye on many sources of error.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#52. No country can sustain, in idleness, more than a small percentage of its numbers. The great majority must labor at something productive.
Abraham Lincoln
#53. Children of yesterday, / Heirs of to-morrow, / What are you weaving? / Labor and sorrow? / Look to your looms again. / Faster and faster / Fly the great shuttles / Prepared by the Master, / Life's in the loom, / Room for it - / Room!
Mary Lasswell
#55. But, most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#56. If we don't have workers organized into labor unions, we're in great peril of losing our democracy.
Dolores Huerta
#57. Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.
Samuel Johnson
#58. The mere fact of knowing that a great audience waits on your labor is enough to shake all your nerves to pieces.
Ignacy Jan Paderewski
#59. Long hours, hard labor, or burning the midnight oil will not produce a Milton, a Shakespeare, or a Beethoven. People accomplish great things through quiet moments, imagining that the invisible things from the foundation of time are clearly visible. You can imagine
Joseph Murphy
#60. Lampis the ship owner, on being asked how he acquired his great wealth, replied, My great wealth was acquired with no difficulty, but my small wealth, my first gains, with much labor.
Epictetus
#61. Led by a new generation of edgy sportswriters like Lipsyte, we found new purpose in the great issues of the day - race, equal opportunity, drugs, and labor disputes. We became personality journalists, medical writers, and business reporters.
Jane Leavy
#62. We should not see those great displacements of capital, of labor, and of population, that legislative measures occasion; displacements that render so uncertain and precarious the very sources of existence, and thus enlarge to such an extent the responsibility of Governments.
Frederic Bastiat
#63. If there was to be a new Europe, there not only had to be a common market, but also great mobility in labor.
Paul Hoffman
#64. Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer.
[1967 interview]
Ray Bradbury
#65. Labor will hurt. Probably a lot. But whether this is negative is another matter ... A laboring woman can be in a great deal of pain, yet feel loved and supported and exhilarated by the creative forces flowing through her body and her ability to meet labor's challenges.
Henci Goer
#66. There are few greater treasures to be acquired in youth than great poetry-and prose-stored in the memory. At the time one may resent the labor of storing. But they sleep in the memory and awake in later years, illuminated by life and illuminating it.
Richard Livingstone
#67. A lot of the roads, bridges, railways, and such are built through the use of forced labor, and that is causing the people great suffering. What we put into this in the form of human suffering is not worth what comes out of it.
Aung San Suu Kyi
#68. As labor is the common burden of our race, so the effort of some to shift their share of the burden onto the shoulders of others is the great durable curse of the race.
Abraham Lincoln
#69. Life is all about toiling and labor. But obviously I get great joy in confronting challenge and taking risk.
Sufjan Stevens
#70. To labor rightly and earnestly is to walk in the golden track that leads to God. It is to adopt the regimen of manhood and womanhood. It is to come into sympathy with the great struggle of humanity toward perfection. It is to adopt the fellowship of all the great and good the world has ever known.
J.G. Holland
#71. The production of wealth is the result of agreement between labor and capital, between employer and employed. Its distribution, therefore, will follow the law of its creation, or great injustice will be done.
Leland Stanford
#72. I think the Mormon Tabernacle Choir is as great as it is because it's become it's a labor of love. They love what they do.
Charles Osgood
#73. Man is tied to the weight of his own past, and even by a great therapeutic labor little more can be accomplished than a shifting of the burden.
Philip Rieff
#75. Our labour preserves us from three great evils
weariness, vice, and want.
Voltaire
#76. American labor may now look to the future with confidence.
James J. Davis
#77. Labor is the great source from which nearly all, if not all, human comforts and necessities are drawn.
Abraham Lincoln
#78. It takes a great deal of labor and love to make ice wine. When you have it with dessert, you miss the point of enjoying it on its own.
Alpana Singh
#79. I know that if the peace movement takes its message boldly to the Negro people a powerful force can be secured in pursuit of the greatest goal of all mankind. And the same is true of labor and the great democratic sections of our population.
Paul Robeson
#80. Money is the great tool through whose means labor and skill become universally co-operative.
Leland Stanford
#81. Speaking as a human being, not as a businessman - the unions are great. The unions are great for the working people because they protect you, but I didn't see them that way as a young man. First of all, the papers would connect them with thee communists - labor unions were communists.
Jack Kirby
#82. The labor movement has a great role to play in our country today.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#83. Few enjoyments are given from the open and liberal hand of nature; but by art, labor and industry we can extract them in great abundance. Hence, the ideas of property become necessary in all civil society.
David Hume
#84. There exist in the world only two great parties; that of those who prefer to live from the produce of their labor or of their property, and that of those who prefer to live on the labor or the property of others.
Charles Dunoyer
#85. Work! labor the asparagus me of life; the one great sacrament of humanity from which all other things flow - security, leisure, joy, art, literature, even divinity itself.
Sean O'Casey
#86. In the Fiji islands, it appears, cannibalism is now familiar. They eat thier own wives and children. We only devour widows' houses, and great merchants outwit and absorb the substance of small ones, and every man feeds on his neighbor's labor if he can. It is a milder form of cannibalism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#87. Our work is great; our time is short; the consequences of our labors are infinite.
John Newton
#88. Love works not for profit nor reward; yet God has ordained that great gain shall be the certain result of every labor of love.
Ellen G. White
#89. The accumulation of great wealth is, in many instances, the effect of paying too little for the labor that produced it, the consequence of which is that the working people perish in old age and the employer abounds in affluence.
Thomas Paine
#90. Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne,
Poets who wrote great poems, one by one,
And spaced by many years, each line an act
Through which few labor, which no men retract.
This passion is the scholar's heritage
Yvor Winters
