Tom Hodgkinson Quotes

“Guilt is also a way for us to express to others that we are a person of good conscience. 'I feel really guilty about getting drunk last night,' we say, when in actual fact we feel no guilt whatsoever or, at least, we could choose to feel no guilt. When people say to me, 'I drank too much last night,' I always reply, 'I drank exactly the right amount.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“Pain will never leave us. Instead of putting energy into destroying pain, we need to put energy into creating pleasure.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“Idleness for me is not a giving up on life but a spirited grabbing hold of it.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“It will soon be difficult to put up a shelf without a degree in shelf putting up.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“A conclusion I've come to at the Idler is that it starts with retreating from work but it's really about making work into something that isn't drudgery and slavery, and then work and life can become one thing.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“Life is becoming no more than staring at the screen.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“Career is just posh slavery.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“What is required as we travel towards full unemployment is not new legislation but a gradual change of mental attitude, a shift in values. As our taste for idling grows, we will refuse to work for old-fashioned bosses who demand a five-day, 40-hour, nine-to-five type week, or worse.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“Laziness works. And the simple way to incorporate its health benefits into your life is simply to take a nap.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“Long weekends at festivals, short weeks at home, all summer long: now that is surely preferable to the immense cost and headache of the nuclear family holiday in the sun?”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“We no longer sing and dance. We don't know how to. Instead, we watch other people sing and dance on the television screen. Christmas, which was once a festival of active enjoyment, has turned into a binge of purely passive pleasures.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

The reason laziness is rarely pushed as a lifestyle option is down to one simple reason: money. There are fortunes to be made out of active lifestyles. Gyms charge fees. But no one is going to make money out of sleep. It is free.

— Tom Hodgkinson

When the going gets tough, the tough take a nap.

— Tom Hodgkinson

“Poetry, being supremely useless, by its very existence represents a protest against the so-called 'real world' of busy-ness and moneymaking, so we must embrace, salute and support our poets.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“When stuck years ago in a job I hated, my only friend was the public bench. As the tedious mornings dragged on, how I would long for the lunch hour, when I would be able to escape the torture of the office and stroll over to the churchyard and into the comforting wooden embrace of one of its benches.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“Punk was a protest against work and against boredom. It was a sign of life, a rant, a scream, a rejection of bourgeois morals. But have things improved since then? Arguably, they've got worse.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“I love the 19th-century idea of the flaneur, the poet wandering through the streets.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

I seethe at the humiliation of airport security checks.

— Tom Hodgkinson

Idleness as a waste of time is a damaging notion put about by its spiritually vacant enemies. The fact that idling can be enormously productive is repressed. Musicians are characterized as slackers; writers as selfish ingrates; artists as dangerous. Robert Louis Stevenson expressed the paradox as follows in "An Apology for Idlers" (1885): "Idleness . . . does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class.

— Tom Hodgkinson

“We need to be responsible for ourselves; we must create our own republics. Today we hand over our responsibility to the boss, to the company, to government, and then blame them when everything goes wrong.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“The idea of the "job" as the answer to all woes, individual and social, is one of the most pernicious myths of modern society. It is promoted by politicians, parents, newspaper moralists and leaders of industry, on the left and on the right: paradise, they say, is "full employment.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

Joyful chaos, working in tune with the seasons, telling the time by the sun, variety, change, self-direction; all this was replaced with a brutal, standardized work culture, the effects of which we are still suffering from today.

— Tom Hodgkinson

It is while prone that ideas come. "A writer could get more ideas for his articles or his novels in this posture than he could by sitting doggedly before his desk morning and afternoon," writes Lin Yutang in his essay "On Lying in Bed.

— Tom Hodgkinson

“Being good to people is the only insurance policy you need.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“Take responsibility for our lives and recognize that we choose how we react to situations and that we can choose to be free if we so wish.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

How much better life would be if we began the day with a poem rather than the empty prattle of newspapers, with their diet of fear, hate, envy and jealousy.

— Tom Hodgkinson

“The job was invented in order to make things easier for those at the top.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

Education itself is a putting off, a postponement; we are told to work hard to get good results. Why? So we can get a good job. What is a good job? One that pays well. Oh. And that's it? All this suffering, merely so that we can earn a lot of money, which, even if we manage it, will not solve our problems anyway? It's a tragically limited idea of what life is all about.

— Tom Hodgkinson

“Faffing is completely harmless, whereas its opposite - dynamic, purposeful activity - is often very harmful. Faffers do not tend to kill people or make them work 12-hour days or sell them shoddy merchandise or lend them vast sums of money that they cannot pay back.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“Alongside my 'no email' policy, I resolve to make better use of the wonderful Royal Mail, and send letters and postcards to people. There is a huge pleasure in writing a letter, putting it in an envelope and sticking the stamp on it. And huge pleasure in receiving real letters, too.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“One of the least arduous but most productive of gardening jobs, the magic of deadheading never fails to delight me. It was a revelation when the principle was explained to me: that flowers are the attempt by the plant to reproduce itself. So if you cut the heads off before the flower turns into seeds, the plant will continue to flower.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“Idleness allows you to turn a situation from boredom to pleasure.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“I'm not sure if I could bear to go on an aeroplane again. It's not my concern for the welfare of the planet. It's not even the long check-in times and queuing. No, it's the humiliation of the security process that has finally done it for me.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“I've never understood activity holidays since we seem to have far too much activity in our daily lives as it is. Find a culture where loafing is the order of the day and where they don't understand our need to be constantly doing things. Find somewhere you can have a hammock holiday.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“Am I the only person in the world who is shocked and amazed at the ongoing flattery of uebergeek Mark Zuckerberg?”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“The phrase 'work/life balance' encapsulates a depressing outlook.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“Deleting 200 spams a day is a drag. And I was checking my email constantly, rather than getting on with my real work, which is reading and writing. Email was becoming a distraction, a burden rather than a liberation.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“Both on an individual and a national scale, debt imprisons.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“Faffing, of course, does not fit the programme. We are supposed to be busy, productive citizens.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“We can live frugally. The less you work, the less you spend and the more time you have for loafing about. But when I put forward this simple notion, I was greeted with a volley of resentment.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

In this age of getting what you want and getting it now, the simple pleasure of browsing is often forgotten.

— Tom Hodgkinson

“If you can find a way to make a living doing something you enjoy, or a range of things that you enjoy, then it can scarcely be called work.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“If you look at the literature of the 19th century, you get things like Kafka and Dostoevsky, who basically write about feeling bored and alienated. That's because we lost contact with the important things in life like work that you enjoy, or the garden, nature, your family and friends.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“The world's richest half billion people - that's about seven per cent of the global population - are responsible for fifty per cent of the world's emissions.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“My hope is that flexible working and varying shift patterns will give workers a taste for idling and that they will gradually demand greater reductions in the length of the working week.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“Of all the depressing abuses of language in business, there is none that gets me so incensed as the rampant overuse of the word 'passionate' in company slogans, marketing blurbs, mission statements and on the sides of vans.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“Part of this individualism is you feel this pressure that you alone have to conquer the world, and if you don't work all the hours God gives then you start feeling really guilty. If you can stop feeling guilty, then I think it's easier to start doing what you want to do.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

When you go for a walk, take seeds with you, poppies, rainbow chard, rocket. Plant them among the weeds in patches of wasteland. See what happens.

— Tom Hodgkinson

“Benjamin Franklin and the whole idea of a new attitude to money: "Time is money." He invented that idea. Before that, time wasn't money in the same way; in the medieval age it was regarded as sinful for money to be the object of your life.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

“Life is about recapturing lost freedoms..”

— Tom Hodgkinson