Quotes about Manual / Physical Labor

Margaret Spellings

There was a time when you could make a living by the sweat of your brow. Those days are over!

There were by then few jobs left in the American economy that did not require fundamental literacy and most required post secondary education as well.

Francis Amasa Walker

The appearance of vast numbers of men, foreign in birth and often in language, with a poorer standard of living, with habits repellent to our native people, of an industrial grade suited only to the lowest kind of manual labor, was exactly such a cause as by any student of population would be expected to affect profoundly the growth of the native population. Americans shrank alike from the social contact and the economic competition thus created. They became increasingly unwilling to bring forth sons and daughters who should be obliged to compete in the market for labor and in the walks of life with those whom they did not recognize as of their own grade and condition.

Although a very learned man, Walker was paranoid about Immigration. In this quotation he actually tried to argue that Americans would actually be more reluctant to have children if those children have to grow up and compete with immigrants. It seems funny to us today, but at the time, with few Americans educated, men like Walker had credibility even when they were absurd. No one else, even the most paranoid nativists ever suggested that immigration reduced the fertility rate of the existing American population. The lower fertility rates have always been associated with more affluence and the existence of a social safety net, where for most immigrants, conditions in their countries of origin realistically made their children the only social security and social safety net that they had.

John W. Gardner

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

Thaddeus Stevens

“Slavery always degrades labor. The white people who work with their hands are ranked with the other laborers— the slaves ... They feel that they are degraded and despised.

George Orwell

It is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior.

Xenophon

The people who give themselves up to manual labor are never promoted to public offices.

This observation seems to have held for many centuries.

Prestonia Mann Martin

There seem to be some persons who do not believe in freedom — for others. They fear that if the common people were free then they would not work for us, or obey us, or do as we think they ought to do. They are even called "lazy". Unhappily it is too true that we have many strains that seem to have become entirely exhausted, perhaps because of the over-work or the dissipation, or both, of their forbears. These people are literally "born tired".

Abraham Lincoln

The old general rule was that educated people did not perform manual labor. They managed to eat their bread, leaving the toil of producing it to the uneducated. This was not an insupportable evil to the working bees, so long as the class of drones remained very small. But now, especially in these free States, nearly all are educated--quite too nearly all, to leave the labor of the uneducated, in any wise adequate to the support of the whole. It follows from this that henceforth educated people must labor. Otherwise, education itself would become a positive and intolerable evil. No country can sustain, in idleness, more than a small percentage of its numbers. The great majority must labor at something productive.

Dov Ber Borochov

The proportion of mental workers increases with the cultural development of the people…. The capitalist, or entrepreneur contributes mental labor to his enterprise. His work is that of organizing and managing the business. The wage-earner’s contribution consists chiefly of physical labor.

This treatise was first published in a Yiddish Newspaper in New York City.

Juan Williams

It’s harder and harder to get a job if you just have a strong back. You need an education.

Peter Drucker

This society in which knowledge workers dominate is in danger of a new "class conflict" between the large minority of knowledge workers and the majority of workers who will make their livings through traditional ways, either by manual work...or by service work

The labor unions and other employee organizations were oriented to the industrial worker originally, and then the teachers and other government employees unions. But the new technology and knowledge workers are not attracted to the same kinds of unions and there is a schism between kinds of workers.

Booker T. Washington

The social lines that were once sharply drawn between those who labored with the hand and those who did not are disappearing. Those who formerly sought to escape labor, now when they see that brains and skill rob labor of the toil and drudgery once associated with it, instead of trying to avoid it are willing to pay to be taught how to engage in it. The South is beginning to see labor raised up, dignified and beautified, and in this sees its salvation.

One of the vestiges of slavery in the South was the negative image that any kind of manual labor had. For whites, that is what slaves did, and for many still “should do”—not whites. For the Blacks, manual labor is what they had been forced and lashed to do, and “slowing down” their productivity was one of the only ways of rebelling. To work hard had been to capitulate to terror and evil. Both races and the economy of the South would suffer for more than a century after the civil war and in some parts of the South the attitudes were reflected into the 21st century.

William Harper

Odium has been cast upon our legislation on account of its forbidding the elements of education to be communicated to slaves. But, in truth, what injury is done to them by this? He who works during the day with his hands does not read in the intervals of his leisure for his amusement or the improvement of his mind. If there were any chance of their elevating their rank and condition in society, it might be a matter of hardship that they should be denied those rudiments of knowledge which open the way to further attainments.

This was an example of the circular logic that defense of slavery produced. Slaves are not interested in education. If they were it would be bad to deny them an education to advance themselves. But since a slave cannot advance, the point is moot and there is no reason to educate a slave even if he or she wanted an education.

Manual / Physical Labor Quotes