Occupational Diversity Quotes

I am acquainted with many Negro poets, contractors, labor leaders, journalists, social workers, physicians, novelists ... It does not strike me as strange that Negroes should be doing all sorts of work. But white people continue to be amazed when they hear of Negroes having such vocations, They regard successful Negroes as freaks, along with trained seals, and infant chess prodigies. .

I know a man who is a diamond cutter. He mows the lawn at Yankee Stadium.

I didn't mind working in the clubs, but I resented it being a club where pimps hang out. Because the music that I create is of a higher intellect than that. It not only encompasses pimps, but whores, ballplayers, executives... everybody.

I'm very proud of being Italian-American, but people don't realize that the mafia is just this aberration. The real community is built on the working man, the guy who's the cop, the fireman, the truck driver, the bus driver.

I worked as an interior designer. I worked as a furniture salesman. I worked as a financial adviser. I worked as a painter and decorator - that wasn't for very long. I was a baker for about four-and-a-half years.

It's like, hey, some people cook for a living, and some people milk cows. I write songs.

'Dirty Jobs' is maybe the simplest show in the history of TV, with the possible exception of 'The Gong Show'. I go around the country; we've shot in every state. And we spend a day with people who do jobs that are dirty or dangerous or ridiculous or difficult.

There were always men looking for jobs in America. There were always all these usable bodies. And I wanted to be a writer. Almost everybody was a writer. Not everybody thought they could be a dentist or an automobile mechanic but everybody knew they could be a writer. Of those fifty guys in the room, probably fifteen of them thought they were writers. Almost everybody used words and could write them down, i.e., almost everybody could be a writer. But most men, fortunately, aren't writers, or even cab drivers, and some men - many men - unfortunately aren't anything.

Every woman who vacates a place in the teachers' ranks and enters an unusual line of work, does two excellent things: she makes room for someone waiting for a place and helps to open a new vocation for herself and other women.

Art is not what most people think it to be. It is not an occupation of one-railed people.

The flaw in our character is our insistence on separating blue-collar jobs from white-collar jobs, and encouraging one form of education over another.

Ninety per cent of my family are hairdressers, and the other 10% are construction workers.

Not every person can be an artist: we need people to run stuff.

I remember all the kids picking their chosen career paths and I was thinking, If I'm an actor I can be an astronaut and a policeman and a firefighter. At the time I was so young that I actually thought actors were all of those things.

We're all different. Some people are musicians, some people are actors, some people are agents and some people are accountants... We're all different.

We must have been hunters and gatherers but some of us were just waiters and hopers.

Laborers want their kids to be merchants or business people. Business people want their kids to be professionals. Professionals want their kids to be academics, professors. Academics want their kids to be artists. And artists don't care if their kids are laborers or not. They can be anything.

Lords are gold and knights steel, but two links can't make a chain. You also need silver and iron and lead, tin and copper and bronze and all the rest, and those are farmers and smiths and merchants and the like. A chain needs all sorts of metals, and a land needs all sorts of people.

I want to do everything. I can never decide on one occupation!

Women are in this respect more fortunate than men, that most of their employments are of such a nature that they can at the same time be thinking of quite different things.

That's just like America. It's made up of lots of different people. We're all different colors, different ages, we do different jobs -- but it takes all of us black people, white people, brown people, men and women, young and old, working in the factories, working in the fields, working in offices, working in stores -- it takes a lot of different kinds of people to get the job done for America.

I sometimes think it ironic for an ex-seaman, longshoreman, truck driver, policeman, bus driver, etc... to find success writing children's novels.

No profession, trade, or calling, is overcrowded in the upper story.

An occupation that has no basis in sex-determined gifts can now recruit its ranks from twice as many potential artists.

To the woman with the least intelligence, there must come, at some time or other, the realization that housework is animal work and that there are other occupations in the world a thousand times more refined, more enriching, for which she is also suited and to which she has a right.