I never did like to work, and I don't deny it. I'd rather read, tell stories, crack jokes, talk, laugh - anything but work.

Abraham Lincoln

As its economic importance wanes, work's control function comes to the fore. Work, like the state, is an institution for the control of the many by the few. It preempts most of our waking hours. It's often physically or mentally enervating. For most people it involves protracted daily direct submission to authority on a scale otherwise unknown to adults who are not incarcerated. Work wrings the energy out of workers, leaving just enough for commuting and consuming. This implies that democracy -- if by this is meant some sort of informed participation by a substantial part of the population in its own governance -- is -illusory.

Bob Black

Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only increase, but never do away with, crime.

Emma Goldman

 

The truth is that the whole life of the worker is simply a continuous and dismaying succession. of terms of serfdom -- voluntary from the juridical point of view but compulsory from an economic sense -- broken up by momentarily brief interludes of freedom accompanied by starvation; in other words, it is real slavery.

-- Mikhail Bakunin

To put it in its starkest form, capitalism is perfectly compatible with slavery. The American South had such a system for more than two centuries. Democracy is not compatible with slavery.

Lester Thurow

 

To be useless is the mark of genius, its patent of nobility.

Arthur Schopenhauer

The people doing moronic work hate that work, and themselves for having to do it-- and, in time, all those who do not have to do it.

 

John Holt

Wealth should come like manna from heaven, unearned and uncalled for. Money should be like grace--a gift. It is not worth sweating and scheming for.

 

Edward Abbey

Any large company composed of wholly admirable persons has the morality and intelligence of an unwieldy, stupid, and violent animal. The bigger the organization, the more unavoidable is its immorality and blind stupidity. ...without freedom there can be no morality.

C.G.Jung

It is our responsibility to build the principle of renewal into the money system by giving all participants in the economy a regular supply of money.

Leonard Orr

 

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 every day. Not because he likes it but because he can’t think of anything else to do.

--W. H. Auden

 

The essentials of the free state were defined in America as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But one cannot pursue happiness: one must pursue something else that will give happiness; and the only happiness that exists is derived from the free creative life. A state is free, then, in proportion to the amount of free life it permits.

 

Northrop Fry

It seems sensible to think of automation as a freeing of people from toil. We might even think that one reasonable objective of automation is to create unemployment-- the more the better! And that a society optimally industrialized should be blessed by nearly total unemployment.

Hugh Kenner

What were the machines for, unless to give man a new freedom to choose how he would live?

Charles A. Reich

Built on the factory model, mass education taught basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, a bit of history and other subjects. This was the 'overt curriculum.' But beneath it lay an invisible or 'covert curriculum' that was far more basic. It consisted-- and still does in most industrial nations, of three courses: one in punctuality, one in obedience, and one in rote, repetitive work.

Alvin Toffler

In universities and all of the professions, the omnipresent poisonous gases gradually stifle... minds and spirits.

Creativity... confined by mandatory menial labor and by deceptively glorified subservient social activities, resulting in 'busy' and enforced... sloth.

Mary Daly

What has been best done in the world-- the works of genius-- cost nothing. There is no painful effort, but it is the spontaneous flowing of the thought.

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In Greek "necessity"- anangke, serves also as the word for "force," "constraint," "compulsion," "violence," and "duress." ...Apparently the Greeks understood very well the connection between necessity and violence, and the requisite that a citizen be a man of leisure indicates that necessity had passed from his life, and he could avoid violence in his thought and behaviour. Freedom to the Greeks could only exist after the conquest of necessity, which demeans man, causing him to have to live with force and violence, his very existence under duress. In that condition he could not be political. Under the pressure of necessity, he resorted to violence.

 

Earl Shorris

One has thereby thoroughly defined the bad. Everything good is instinct, and consequently easy; necessarily free. Effort is an objection.

 

Friedrich Nietzsche

All paid employments absorb and degrade the mind.

 

Aristotle

Sharon Beder

There is also a keen pleasure (and after all, what else should the pursuit of science produce?) in meeting the riddle of the initial blossoming of man's mind by postulating a voluptuous pause in the growth of the rest of nature, a lolling and loafing which allowed first of all the formation of Homo Poeticus-- without which sapiens could not have been evolved. "Struggle for life" indeed! The curse of battle and toil leads man back to the boar, to the grunting beast's crazy obsession with the search for food. You and I have frequently remarked upon that maniacal glint in a housewife's scheming eye as it roves over food in a grocery or about the morgue of a butcher's shop. Toilers of the world, disband! Old books are wrong. The world was made on a Sunday.

Vladimir Nabokov