Margaret Spellings Quotes

I'm a Detroit kid who grew up with that assembly line mentality: You go to work to make money.

The role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish in the same way that the role of the horse in agricultural production.

The result [of more rapidly adopting technology] is likely to be more unemployment in the short term and perhaps greater inequality—a recipe for social instability. Economists are right to remind us that workers who are displaced by machine intelligence need not be condemned to long-term idleness. Given the infinite variety of human desires, there is always more work to be done. But society will need to facilitate social structures that help employees face a lifetime of job changes.

There are the manufacturing multitudes of England; they must have work, and find markets for their work; if machines and the Black Country are ugly, famine would be uglier still.

The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.

My family were really hard-working, blue-collar people, and I didn't know the idea or concept of working and having fun. I thought you just worked and made money to support your family.

When you grow up with a mother who has to wash dishes and clean hotel rooms, you know the importance of having a job, and you can't be without a job for any length of time, or you will be without anything.

I don’t buy the argument that there are certain jobs that American just will not do.

The world is full of willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them

The machines, which mark the triumph of science, become, by reason of the antithetic conditions of the social plexus, instruments which impoverish millions and millions of artisans and free peasants.

There is a law of nature which has decreed that a man must work. The diving law declares that only by the sweat of his brow shall a man eat bread. There is a law pretty generally recognized among the advanced nations that every honest labourer is worthy of his hire, but only the conspicuously meritorious deserve special commendation. The stern practice of the world is that a man shall not obtain his food for nothing. Unless he labours in his vocation neither shall he receive wages.

Nobody works harder than American workers. We are the hardest working people in the world.

‘The laboring poor’ is a detestable, canting phrase.

In Victorian England, laborers were pushed off the farms, replaced by steam power.

The most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labor to leisure.

The unemployed want to work. They are not chiselers.

I was raised as a real worker: you know, you get out and get a real job.

A lot of what we do at Fox is blue-collar stuff.

In antiquity, agriculture and industry depended completely on human labor; but now, with the development of natural forces that human labor cannot match, agriculture and industry have fallen completely into the hands of the capitalists. The greater the amount of capital, the more abundant the resources that can be utilized.

Dad was a machinist who had to work hard - harder than any man I have ever known.

My father was incredible: a longshoreman; my mother was a secretary. Very 'go to work' people. That's how I saw things.

Americans like workers, people who slog. I love working.

There's a lot more blue-collar workers out there than the so-called elites.

The hardest work in the world is being out of work.

My first job was with an auto plant, Kansas City - they treated you like slaves. From there I went back to Chicago, worked in steel mills, drove a cab, stuff like that.