Alice Morse Earle Quotes

A man working for wages his whole life is not really free. That is why Jefferson said, you have to own land. Southerners said, - and they weren't being hypocritical - they said slavery is the foundation of freedom because if you own slaves, you are freer yourself.

I've spent my life supporting myself.

Happy the country that lives on nothing but its wits; cursed be the one that thinks it can get rich by planting or digging or drilling for wealth.

My father certainly believed that one could make a living outside of an office, as he did. And that if I didn't want to work for other people, there wasn't any reason why I had to. He conveyed that very strongly to my sister and I - that smart people can make their own livings.

There cannot be a stronger natural right than that of a man's making the best profit he can of the natural produce of his lands.

If you make a living, if you earn your own money, you're free - however free one can be on this planet.

People so primitive that they did not know how to get money except by working for it.

All progress is based upon the universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.

It results from our having such quantities of land to waste as we please. In Europe the object is to make the most of their land, labour being abundant: here it is to make the most of our labour, land being abundant

Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread.

Not only there does not exist, nor can exist, any other revenue than the clear produce of land, but it is the earth also that has furnished all capitals, that form the mass of all the advances of culture and commerce.

Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.

Zimbabwe is for Zimbabweans; so are its resources.

I'm a Rasta man, and I can't have a piece of land that isn't something I want to eat from.

Part of the American dream is 'I can own my own business, I can control my destiny. I can have the opportunity to work for myself.'

You don't need to depend on a label, because you're making that money on your own.

Thrift is not some obsolete Victorian notion. . . . It will be the difference between those who prosper and achieve respect and those who become a burden to their children and society.

For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labour of my hands, and I found, that by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living.

Iraq has tremendous resources that belong to the Iraqi people. And so there are a variety of means that Iraq has to be able to shoulder much of the burden for ther own reconstruction.

Self-sufficiency is the greatest of all wealth .

[On her Freedom Farm Cooperative:] If you give a hungry man food, he will eat it. [But] if you give him land, he will grow his own food.

America touts itself as the land of the free, but the number one freedom that you and I have is the freedom to enter into a subservient role in the workplace. Once you exercise this freedom you’ve lost all control over what you do, what is produced, and how it is produced. And in the end, the product doesn’t belong to you. The only way you can avoid bosses and jobs is if you don’t care about making a living. Which leads to the second freedom: the freedom to starve.

Every human being should be taught that his first duty is to take care of himself, and that to be self-respecting he must be self-supporting. To live on the labor of others, either by force which enslaves, or by cunning which robs, or by borrowing or begging, is wholly dishonorable. Every man should be taught some useful art.

A farm is a good thing, when it begins and ends with itself, and does not need a salary, or a shop, to eke it out.

Instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.