Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Those services which the community will most readily pay for it is most disagreeable to render. You are paid for being something less than a man.

We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men.

An actress is not a machine, but they treat you like a machine. A money machine.

I hate this fast growing tendency to chain men to machines in big factories and deprive them of all joy in their efforts - the plan will lead to cheap men and cheap products.

Work ends up dehumanizing people.

Money commands everything because that's our interpretation of capitalism... what kind of world is that? It's a very uncomfortable interpretation of a human being. We have been turned into robots.

I'd always been treated like an object, not like a human.

All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.

To a newspaperman, a human being is an item with the skin wrapped around it.

The marriage of Capital with Science was responsible for the great leap forward into what we live in today. Pure scientists discovered the components into which the natural environment could be decomposed; investors placed their bets on the various methods of decomposition; applied scientists or managers saw to it that the wage workers in their charge carried the project through. Social scientists sought ways to make the workers less human, more efficient and machine-like. Thanks to science, capitalists were able to transform much of the natural environment into a processed world, an artifice, and to reduce most human beings into efficient tenders of the artifice.

Yes, sir, no, sir, clock in, clock out. Why were you late? Why are you not in today? That's not how humans are supposed to live.

There are many families that want to raise kids on one income, or one income and some part-time work, and instead find themselves pressured, financially and culturally, to keep up with the dual-earning Smith-Joneses next door.

I think that the dehumanization of another person can happen in the matter of an instant.

I make no apologies in admitting that I take very seriously the dehumanizing dangers in our tendency in modern science to make man over into the image of the machine, into the image of the techniques by which we study him.

I have immense amount of respect for women who leave their kids and go to work because they have to. They don't have a choice. I couldn't have done that.

It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men: divided into mere segments of men - broken into small fragments and crumbs of life, so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail.

The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, - a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man. Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm.

It's as if all identity has been stolen from them, except their identity as slaves.

In far too many families with young children, both parents are working, when, if they really took an honest look at the budget, they might find they don't both need to. ... What happened in America so that mothers and fathers who leave their children in the care of someone else - or worse yet, home alone after school between three and six in the afternoon - find themselves more affirmed by society? Here, we can thank the influence of radical feminism.

To regard human beings as tools - as instruments - for the use of other human beings is not only unscientific but it is repugnant, stupid and short sighted. Tools are made by man but have not the autonomy of their maker - they have not man's time-binding capacity for initiation, for self-direction, and self-improvement.

I know that family life in America is a minefield, an economic trap for women, a study in disappointment for both sexes.

Whatever day Makes man a slave, takes half his worth away.

Generations of human beings were transformed into machines in the relentless pursuit of material wealth: We lived to work.

And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things.

Forced from home, and all its pleasures, afric coast I left forlorn; to increase a stranger's treasures, o the raging billows borne. Men from England bought and sold me, paid my price in paltry gold; but, though theirs they have enroll'd me, minds are never to be sold.