...writing was the most productive direction for my being to take. ...is now interfered with only by the office, but that interferes with it completely... I need only to throw my work in the office out of this complex in order to begin my real life.

 

Franz Kafka

Earning a wage is a prison occupation--and a wage-earner is a sort of jail bird. Earning a salary is a prison overseer's job, a jailer instead of a jailbird. Living on your income is strolling grandly outside the prison, in terror lest you have to go in, and since the work-prison covers almost every scrap of the living earth, you stroll up and down on a narrow beat, about the same as a prisoner taking his exercise. This is called Universal Freedom.

D. H. Lawrence

Personally, I have nothing against work, particularly when performed, quietly and unobtrusively, by someone else. I just don't happen to think it's an appropriate subject for an "ethic."

 

Barbara Ehrenreich

 

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.

William Wordsworth

Buying and selling is essentially anti-social.

Edward Bellamy

I want to prevent as many men as possible from pretending that they have to do this or that because they must earn a living. It is not true. One can starve to death. It is much better. Every man who voluntarily starves to death jams another cog in the automatic process.

Henry Miller

A society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure and to another all the burdens of work condemns both classes to spiritual sterility

 

Lewis Mumford

Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks the whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns somersaults when there is no whip.

 

George Orwell

Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.

 

Oscar Wilde

 

Whoever has to work for a living is blocked on the road to wisdom and suffers, as far as leisure is concerned, the fate of slaves.

Sebastian de Grazia

Norman Mailer

A piece of freedom is no longer enough for human beings... unlike bread, a slice of liberty does not finish hunger. Freedom is like life. It cannot be had in installments. Freedom is indivisible - we have it all, or we are not free.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

If people really liked to work, we'd still be plowing the land with sticks and transporting goods on our backs.

William Faulkner

It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.

Ayn Rand

There is a vast world of work out there in this country, where at least 111 million people are employed in this country alone--many of whom are bored out of their minds. All day long. Not for nothing is their motto TGIF -- 'Thank God It's Friday.' They live for the weekends, when they can go do what they really want to do.

Richard Nelson Bolles

Most of the earth's inhabitants work to get by. They work because they have to. They didn't pick this or that kind of job out of passion; the circumstances of their lives did the choosing for them. Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven't got even that much, however loveless and boring -- this is one of the harshest human miseries.

José Saramago

I ask you: Are you free? I say we are slaves. All of us.

I ask you: Are you different from the many who secretly feel like slaves -- slaves to their jobs from which they cannot escape, slaves to a government that no longer serves them but to which they have become hopelessly indentured, slaves to a life that is beyond their control?

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected.

John Steinbeck

 

....when I was working in the nuthouse. People weren't in the nuthouse because they had been mistreated in the bathroom by their parents. They weren't in the nuthouse because they had a mother that mothered them for too long. They were in the nuthouse because they had done something that was supposed to bring them rewards in the American Dream, and the rewards weren't coming to them... yet they had worked hard... the farmers in middle America. They work harder and harder, and it's still not paying off for them... so they begin to look around for someone to blame.

Ken Kesey

Of my city the worst that men will ever say is this:
You took little children away from the sun and the dew,
And the glimmers that played in the grass under the great sky,
And the reckless rain; you put them between walls
To work, broken and smothered, for bread and wages,
To eat dust in their throats and die empty-hearted
For a little handful of pay on a few Saturday nights.

Carl Sandburg