Thomas Jefferson Quotes

We have to challenge the whole idea that it's acceptable for a society like Britain to have such a significant number of people who do not work one day of the week and don't have any possibility of improving the quality of their lives.

The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.

As long as the working-people fold hands and pray the gods in Washington to give them work, so long they will not get it. So long as they tramp the streets, whose stones they lay, whose filth they clean, whose sewers they dig, yet upon which they must not stand too long lest the policeman bid them "move on"; as long as they go from factory to factory, begging for the opportunity to be a slave, receiving the insults of bosses and foremen, getting the old "no," the old shake of the head, in these factories they built, whose machines they wrought; so long as they consent to herd like cattle, in the cities, driven year after year, more and more, off the mortgaged land, the land they cleared, fertilized, cultivated, rendered of value; so long as they stand shivering, gazing thro' plate glass windows at overcoats, which they made, but cannot buy, starving in the midst of food they produced but cannot have; so long as they continue to do these things vaguely relying upon some power outside themselves, be it god, or priest, or politician, or employer, or charitable society, to remedy matters, so long deliverance will be delayed.

We can't afford as a nation - not because of money but because of our social fabric - to have large numbers of people who are not working.

Child labor perpetuates poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, population growth, and other social problems.

A young man who does not have what it takes to perform military service is not likely to have what it takes to make a living. Today's military rejects include tomorrow's hard-core unemployed.

I can tell you that when I travel the state, when I talk to people, they are really struggling, in a very real way. They're losing their jobs, they're losing their homes, they're dealing with financial challenges.

The cause of homelessness is lack of housing.

There's nothing more unfair than a guy that doesn't have a job.

In the last era of the [civil rights] movement, the disenfranchised were the blacks, the colored. Now the disenfranchised are the have-nots, the unemployed, the hungry.

There are but two families in the world … The haves and the have-nots.

It is unjust to let any starve, when we think it just to limit the wages of the poor, so as they can lay up nothing against the time of their impotency and want of work.

Most poor people earn more than minimum wage when they are working; their problem is not low wages. The problem comes when they are not working.

We happen to be living in an era when, in consequence of human gullibility and fallibility, the world has been overtaken by panic and distress such as private initiative alone cannot cope with. To an extent that could previously never have been expected the cities, the states, and the central government have been compelled to undertake to provide relief where voluntary agencies have been unequal to the task.

Jobless Men Keep Going We Can’t Take Care of Our Own

The unemployed want to work. They are not chiselers.

Viciousness and prejudice flow from economic dislocation, and in turn feed it.

Workers all too frequently have been taking it on the chin. They're working hard and falling behind, all too frequently.

I remain deeply concerned about falling wages and the lack of good jobs for Americans. Too many of our citizens are either stuck in place or falling behind, and too often their needs are forgotten.

Having no work would be terrible.

My real passion is social justice, resolving the lack of empowerment, the lack of skills, the fact that young people can't get on the housing ladder, they feel they can't have a decent job, they feel they aren't in control of their lives.

When economist William Beveridge dreamed up the postwar welfare state he wanted to fight five 'giant evils' - want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. Fast forward 65 years and it seems the last New Labour government grew an Unfair State that fuelled - not fought - one of those evils: idleness.

Workfare will merely accentuate the growth of the low-paying, insecure labour market.

The right-wingers don't want to admit that for some people, there are no jobs; they think that conscientiousness in and of itself will do the trick.

There's unrecognizable change happening in Britain. The life prospects and job prospects, particularly of working-class people, have been severely dented. Without anyone being asked.