Thomas Dekker Quotes
Honest labor bears a lovely face.
Dekker, Thomas, Henry Chettle, and William Haughton. Patient Grissil. London, Henry Holland, 1603. Reprinted in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, Vol. 1, edited by Fredson Bowers, Cambridge University Press, 1953, p. 213.
This used to be a generally accepted principle in America. It took labor to produce wealth. It could be someone else’s labor or even slave labor, but labor produced things or labor enabled us to find minerals like gold or oil. However, in modern capitalism, money itself can produce wealth by investing or yielding interest. Inventions produce wealth as do other ideas. Authors and movie producers produce wealth. Who you know can produce wealth (finder’s fees) as can knowledge.
Mormons in later years found this principle difficult to enforce where there was unemployment and workers were idle through no fault of their own. The local Mormon churches were very active in encouraging wealthier Mormons to hire those who were unemployed.
One of the major factors in the Chinese economic development is the traditional hard work ethic of the Chinese people. Many other people work hard because they have to in order to survive, but many other cultures support a norm of hard work as a virtue per se. The Han Chinese work ethic is like the Protestant work ethic in that successful, even wealthy, people work very hard. Many successful Americans work far longer than 40 hours a week and the Han Chinese are very similar.
Thomas Dekker was an English Elizabethan dramatist and pamphleteer, a versatile and prolific writer, whose career spanned several decades and brought him into contact with many of the period's most famous dramatists.
