I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours, a fixed salary, and very little original thinking to do.

The workers are the saviors of society, the redeemers of the race.

Man is a tool-using animal. Nowhere do you find him without tools; without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.

A human being must have occupation, if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world.

Labor is no disgrace.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

I hate the present modes of living and getting a living. Farming and shopkeeping and working at a trade or profession are all odious to me. I should relish getting my living in a simple, primitive fashion.

You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.

One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat eight hours a day, nor drink for eight hours a day, nor make love for eight hours.

I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.

He that would eat the nut must crack the shell.

It is shameful and inhuman to treat men like chattels to make money by, or to regard them merely as so much muscle or physical power.