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

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.

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

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.

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.

Sick, irritated, and the prey to a thousand discomforts, I go on with my labor like a true workingman, who, with sleeves rolled up, in the sweat of his brow, beats away at his anvil, not caring whether it rains or blows, hails or thunders.

Plough deep while sluggards sleep.

Toil is man’s allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that’s more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.

All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.

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

Every man is worth just so much as the things he busies himself with.

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

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