Labor is the fabled magician’s wand, the philosophers stone, and the cap of good fortune.
– James Weldon Johnson
As labor creates the wealth of the country, we demand the passage of such laws as may be necessary to protect it in all its rights.
– John Peter Altgeld
The end of labor is to gain leisure.
– Aristotle
There is no labor a person does, that is undignified; if they do it right.
– Bill Cosby
There is no real wealth but the labor of man.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley
Labor is man’s greatest function. He is nothing, he can do nothing, he can achieve nothing, he can fulfill nothing, without working.
– Orville Dewey
For as labor cannot produce without the use of land, the denial of the equal right to the use of land is necessarily the denial of the labor to its own produce.
– Henry George
Labor can not stand still. It must not retreat. It must go on, or go under.
– Harry Bridges
It is labor alone that is productive: it creates wealth and therewith lays the outward foundations for the inward flowering of man.
– Ludwig Von Mises
Labor wants pride and joy in doing good work, a sense of making or doing something beautiful or useful to be treated with dignity and respect as brother and sister.
– Thorstein Veblen
A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.
– Victor Hugo
Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
– Abraham Lincoln
People might not get all that they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all that they get.
– Frederick Douglass
Not all the labor of the earth is done by hardened hands.
– Will Carleton
Labor can and will become its own employer through co-operative association.
– Leland Stanford
Labor is the only prayer that nature answers.
– Robert Green Ingersoll
Labor disgraces no man; unfortunately, you occasionally find men who disgrace labor.
– Ulysses S. Grant
Labor is the instituted means for the methodical development of all our powers under the direction and control of the will.
– Josiah Gilbert Holland
Labor never quits. We never give up the fight no matter how tough the odds, no matter how long it takes.
– George Meany
Labor is the fruit of civilization, not the basis of it.
– Alexander Crummell
Labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionately brutalized.
– Nathaniel Hawthorne
It is only by labor that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labor can be happy; and the two cannot be separated with impunity.
– John Ruskin
Labor is today the most vital and potential power this planet has ever known, and its historic mission is as certain of ultimate realization as is the setting of the sun.
– Eugene V. Debs
All labor is coerced labor and hence a form of servitude.
– Steven B. Smith
Labor is discovered to be the grand conqueror, enriching and building up nations more surely than the proudest battles.
– William Ellery Channing
Labor in all its variety, corporeal and mental, is the instituted means for the methodical development of all our powers, under the direction and control of will.
– Josiah Gilbert Holland
Labor was the first price, the original purchase money that was paid for all things.
– Adam Smith
