Worker Quotes
More Worker Quotes
In manufacture and in handicrafts, the worker uses a tool; in the factory, he serves a machine.
— 1867 Das Kapital.
What's bad about my biography? My father was a worker, my brothers, too, and I have always honestly served my country.
hovhannes bagramyan— Quoted in "The 900 Days: The Siege Of Leningrad" - Page 112 - by Harrison E. Salisbury - History - 2003
I found it intellectually numbing, tedious in the extreme. All you were was a sort of high-powered social worker and perhaps not even a good one. So I won't miss that.
lord stratford— "Obituary: Tony Banks", BBC News, 9 January 2006
— comments on constituency work after standing down as an MP
They will do anything for the worker, except become one.
gregory benford— Chapter 5 (p. 46, concerning the peers)
You rush a miracle worker, you get lousy miracles!
jim butcher— Character: Harry Dresden, Chapter 24(tribute to Miracle Max from The Princess Bride)
He's a meticulously hard worker and yet he'll roam the grass of his farm for hours and sometimes for days before he can bring himself to put a word on paper.
— Richard Rodgers, quoted in Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein II (2004). Retrieved on 2007-12-12.
As far as service goes, it can take the form of a million things. To do service, you don't have to be a doctor working in the slums for free, or become a social worker. Your position in life and what you do doesn't matter as much as how you do what you do.
elisabeth kübler-ross— As quoted in Another Door Opens (2006) by Jeffrey A. Wands. p. 29
A normal chap, a man who likes creating things. A good worker in the morning, and a man who likes enjoying himself in the afternoon.
ferruccio lamborghini— In response to the question, "So, Mr. Lamborghini, in short what type of man are you?" asked by a television reporter, broadcast on RAI. YouTube video
When a Russian pig has to be beaten, it would be the ordinary German worker who would have to do it.
robert ley— Quoted in The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze - Page 529
Mickey is a hard worker. He takes care of the house, looks after my animals, and satisfies me. What else can one expect of a man?
jayne mansfield— On her second husband, Mickey Hargitay
Throughout all the years and in everything we do, we have focused most of all on the development of human capacity, beginning with our own professional staff, and leveraging their expertise to enrich the Arab community. We have embraced the concept of the ‘knowledge worker’ and have sought to empower our people and the Arab world’s people to dream, to imagine, and to create. Creating a system to protect industrial and intellectual property is a prerequisite for the transfer of technology and consequently the resurgence of national technologies.
talal abu-ghazaleh— June 18, 2007, National Seminar on Industrial Property and Technology Transfer in Arab States, Amman, Jordan.
A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing.
joseph conrad— Notes on Life and Letters, 1921, part II, "Well Done"
Work almost always has a double aspect: it is a bondage, a wearisome drudgery; but it is also a source of interest, a steadying element, a factor that helps to integrate the worker with society. Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.
Simone de Beauvoir— Pt I, Ch. 4: Old age in present-day society, p. 263
An understandable hunger for … potential clients tempts many [career counseling therapists] to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or sentimentality, sometimes imply that all of their students could one day produce worthwhile literature, rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth, anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer, like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event, … immune to the methods of factory farming.
Alain de Botton— pp. 126-127 (The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009))
It does not matter whether the worker wants responsibility or not, ...The enterprise must demand it of him.
Peter Drucker— p. 304 (The Practice of Management (1954))
At this moment in history, millions of 'working dads' are desiring to do what they do not feel they have the right to do: be more devoted as a dad, less devoted as a worker. This feeling is far more ubiquitous among men executives than women executives in many areas of the world because, for instance, Asia-Pacific women executives today are more than six times as likely to not have children than men executives are. The Asia-Pacific executive man is about six times as likely to be a working dad as an executive woman is to be a working mom.
warren farrell— p. 113. (Part IV: Where do we go from here)
Because of their historical theory of the “alienation of labor” (that the worker must become less and less in control of the work of his hands) the Marxist parties never fought for the man-worthy job itself.
paul goodman— p. 37 (Growing Up Absurd (1956))
I am a worker, a tombstone mason, anxious to pleace averyburies and jully glad when Christmas comes his once ayear.
james joyce— Page 113 (Finnegans Wake (1939))
If anyone wants to know why we must conduct ourselves [with commonsense and realism], just remember at all times, with all temptations, how you, each and every one of you sitting in this hall, each and every Labour worker watching this conference, each and every Labour voter, yes, and some others as well, remember how you felt on that dreadful morning of the tenth of June. Just remember how you felt then, and think to yourselves: 'June the ninth, 1983, never ever again will we experience that.'
neil kinnock— Speech to the Labour Party Conference after winning the 1983 leadership election (October 2, 1983), reported in Labour Party Annual Conference Report 1983, p. 30.
You and I both know that there can be no real solution of the Indian problem which does not also benefit Britain. Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does. It is so obvious, is it not, that the British worker as well as the Indian peasant stands to gain by the ending of capitalist exploitation, and that Indian independence is a lost cause if the Fascist nations are allowed to dominate the world.
george orwell— From a review of Letters on India by Mulk Raj Anand, Tribune (19 March 1943)
I live in the USSR, work actively and count naturally on the worker and peasant spectator. If I am not comprehensible to them I should be deported.
dmitri shostakovich— In discussion with an opera audience, January 14, 1930; cited from Laurel Fay Shostakovich: A Life (2000) p. 55.
The test of the worth of work is its effect on the worker. If it degrade him, it is bad; if it ennoble him, it is good.
john lancaster spalding— 12
The new and most powerful union of all will be a union of one one man, one woman, one worker with special skills, an inquiring mind, and an independent attitude, his creativity intact, his love of life blooming. The union of one will be peopled by one man or one woman who is alive . Such a person is always sought by the intelligent manager.
gerry spence— Ch. 17 : Success Redefined, p. 178
Prostitution is said to be the world’s oldest profession . It is, indeed, a model of all professional work: the worker relinquishes control over himself … in exchange for money. Because of the passivity it entails, this is a difficult and, for many, a distasteful role.
thomas szasz— p. 45 (The Second Sin (1973))
I felt like a social worker a lot of the time.
stella vine— "Debt, Diana and homesickness" The Journal, (2004-06-08)On stripping.
Our staggeringly pompous president is incapable of comprehending that a businessman cannot pay a worker in excess of his productivity and hope to stay solvent.
— "The Glories of Hussein’s Proctology", WorldNetDaily.com, October 3, 2013.
The executive is, first of all, expected to get the right things done. And this is simply saying that he is expected to be effective […] For manual work, we need only efficiency ; that is, the ability to do things right rather than the ability to get the right things done. The manual worker can always be judged in terms of the quantity and quality of a definable and discrete output, such as a pair of shoes
— Peter Drucker (1967) The Effective Executive. Heinemann, London. p. 1
The worker is not the problem. The problem is at the top! Management!
— W. Edwards Deming (1993, p. 54) cited in: Melanie M. Minarik (2008) Building Knowledge Through Sensemaking. p.13
...rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth , anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer , like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event ,...
— Alain de Botton, in The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, p.112
