Workers, The Labor Force Quotes

Gunsmiths must fix all Armes...brought them by any of the Souldiers of this Countrey.

Even as we are a nation of immigrants, we’re also a nation of laws. Undocumented workers broke our immigration laws, and I believe that they must be held accountable – especially those who may be dangerous. That’s why, over the past six years, deportations of criminals are up 80 percent. And that’s why we’re going to keep focusing enforcement resources on actual threats to our security. Felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mom who’s working hard to provide for her kids. We’ll prioritize, just like law enforcement does every day.

Labor in white skin cannot be free so long as labor in a black skin is branded.

If they are good workmen, they may be of Asia, Africa or Europe. They may be Mohammetans [Moslems] Jews or Christians or any Sect–or they may be Atheists.

I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and who have lived here even though sometime back they may have entered illegally. With regard to the employer sanctions, we must have that not only to ensure that we can identify the illegal aliens, but also, while some keep protesting about what it would do to employers, there is another employer that we shouldn't be so concerned about, and these are employers down through the years who have encouraged the illegal entry into this country because they then hire these individuals and hire them at starvation wages and with none of the benefits that we think are normal and natural for workers in our country, and the individuals can't complain because of their illegal status. We don't think that those people should be allowed to continue operating free.

Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.

The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition, and the revival of the old-style citizens militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed.

Whom do I hate most, among all the rabble of to-day?' The Socialist who undermines the workingman's instincts, who destroys his satisfaction with his insignificant existence, who makes him envious and teaches him revenge.”

There are three ways by which an individual can get wealth—by work, by gift, and by theft. And, clearly, the reason why the workers get so little is that the beggars and thieves get so much.

The great wall of China was built just as much to keep the Chinese in as to keep the barbarians out.

Ours is a people's democratic dictatorship, led by the working class and based on the worker-peasant alliance.

Eight hours daily labor is enough for any human being

The question of prostitutes will give rise to many serious problems here. Take them back to productive work, bring them into the social economy. That is what we must do. But it is difficult and a complicated task to carry out in the present conditions of our economic life and in all the prevailing circumstances. There you have one aspect of the women’s problem which, after the seizure of power by the proletariat, looms large before us and demands a practical solution. It will give us a great deal of work here in Soviet Russia

The working men have no country. We cannot take away from them what they have not got.

There is no use in repeating that threadbare capitalist boast that we have more things than ever before and that workers are better off than were ancient kings. The point is that no age has ever so tragically failed to use the machinery it had for ease and security of living. Things may have increased but so has insecurity. The peasant and artisan of old was assured work and an honorable place in his family and community while he lived. He knew nothing of the dead line at forty or forty-five which gives new terror to old age. He knew almost nothing of unemployment as a social disease which in so-called normal times affects some ten per cent of the workers and is today the lot of twenty-five to thirty-three per cent of them.

There are wise people who talk ever so knowingly and complacently about "the working classes," and satisfy themselves that a day's hard intellectual work is very much harder than a day's hard manual toil, and is righteously entitled to much bigger pay. Why, they really think that, you know, because they all know about the one, but haven't tried the other. But I know all about both; and as far as I am concerned, there isn't money enough in the universe to hire me to swing a pickaxe thirty days, but I will do the hardest kind of intellectual work for just as near nothing as you can cipher it down--and I will be satisfied, too. Intellectual "work" is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation and its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer, is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the magician with the fiddle-bow in his hand who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him--why certainly, he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord, it's a sarcasm just the same. The law of work does seem utterly unfair--but there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash, also.

Workers cannot buy with their salaries what they have produced and at the same time copiously nourish the swarm of idlers who live upon their work.

When the businessmen of the country were demanding the right to organize themselves adequately to promote their legitimate interests; when the farmers were demanding legislation which would give them opportunities and incentives to organize themselves for a common advance, it was natural that the workers should seek and obtain a statutory declaration of their constitutional right to organize themselves for collective bargaining.

The industrial revolution caused unspeakable misery both in England and in America … In the Lancashire cotton mills (from which Marx and Engels derived their livelihood), children worked from 12 to 16 hours a day; they often began working at the age of six or seven. Children had to be beaten to keep them from falling asleep while at work; in spite of this, many failed to keep awake and were mutilated or killed. Parents had to submit to the infliction of these atrocities upon their children, because they themselves were in a desperate plight. Craftsmen had been thrown out of work by the machines; rural labourers were compelled to migrate to the towns by the Enclosure Acts, which used Parliament to make landowners richer by making peasants destitute; trade unions were illegal until 1824; the government employed agents provocateurs to try to get revolutionary sentiments out of wage-earners, who were then deported or hanged. Such was the first effect of machinery in England.

Free Blacks are unfavorable to our industry and morals.

I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.

The workingmen have been exploited all the way up and down the line by employers, landlords, everybody.

The real wealth of a nation resides in its farms and factories and the people who man them.

The thing which has made Labor great & powerful is labor-saving machinery--& nothing else in the world could have done it. It has been labor's savior, benefactor; but Labor doesn't know it, & would ignorantly crucify it. But that is human & natural.

No man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him.