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.

God sells us all things at the price of labor.

A man is not idle, because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

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

A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do.

Man must be doing something, or fancy that he is doing something, for in him throbs the creative impulse; the mere basker in the sunshine is not a natural, but an abnormal man.

Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.

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

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.

I am a friend of the workingman, and I would rather be his friend than be one.

He that would eat the nut must crack the shell.

“Work” does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.

Hang work! I wish that all the year were holiday; I am sure that Indolence—indefeasible Indolence—is the true state of man.