Dignity Of Labor Quotes

“A truly American sentiment recognizes the dignity of labor and the fact that honor lies in honest toil.”

— Grover Cleveland

“Dignity does not float down from heaven it cannot be purchased nor manufactured. It is a reward reserved for those who labor with diligence.”

— Bill Hybels

“You have to be a cop-out or a wash-out or a dropout to come to our college. You have to work with your hands. You have to have a dignity of labor. You have to show that you have a skill that you can offer to the community and provide a service to the community. So we started the Barefoot College, and we redefined professionalism.”

— Bunker Roy

“I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living.”

— John D. Rockefeller

“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

“I have had an aversion to good spelling for sixty years and more, merely for the reason that when I was a boy there was not a thing I could do creditably except spell according to the book. It was a poor and mean distinction, and I early learned to disenjoy it. I suppose that this is because the ability to spell correctly is a talent, not an acquirement. There is some dignity about an acquirement, because it is a product of your own labor. It is earned, whereas to be able to do a thing merely by the grace of God, and not by your own effort, transfers the thing to our heavenly home
where possibly it is a matter of pride and satisfaction, but it leaves you naked and bankrupt.”

— Mark Twain

“Sometimes the thought of his mother working so hard while he did nothing would come suddenly upon his and he would rush off and try to help her, but whatever he did turned out wrong ... So that it always ended in his mother saying, 'Oh, run along for goodness' sakes, and let me get on with my work.' And then Jack would go and lie on his front ... and make up pretty poems about the Dignity of Labor, or about how dear and good mothers are.”

— E. Nesbit

“No work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

“All labor has dignity.”

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

“They were always cold, and usually hungry as well. Only Boxer and Clover never lost heart. Squealer made excellent speeches on the joy of service and the dignity of labor, but the other animals found more inspiration in Boxer's strength and his never-failing cry of I will work harder!”

— George Orwell

“Simple people with less education, sophistication, social ties, and professional obligations seem in general to have somewhat less difficulty in facing this final crisis than people of affluence who lose a great deal more in terms of material luxuries, comfort, and number of interpersonal relationships. It appears that people who have gone through a life of suffering, hard work, and labor, who have raised their children and been gratified in their work, have shown greater ease in accepting death with peace and dignity compared to those who have been ambitiously controlling their environment, accumulating material goods, and a great number of social relationships but few meaningful interpersonal relationships which would have been available at the end of life.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

“The dignity of labor depends not on what you do, but how you do it.”

— Edwin Osgood Grover

“The basic goal of labor will not change. It is - as it has always been, and I am sure always will be - to better the standards of life for all who work for wages and to seek decency and justice and dignity for all Americans.”

— George Meany

“The income tax is bad because it was conceived in class hatred, is an instrument of vengeance and plays right into the hands of the communists. It employs the vicious communist principle of taking from each according to his accumulation of the fruits of his labor and giving to others according to their needs, regardless of whether those needs are the result of indolence, or lack of pride, self-respect, personal dignity or other attributes of men.”

— T. Coleman Andrews

“If you would make a man happy, study not to augment his goods; but to diminish his wants. One of the greatest services Christianity has rendered the world has been its consecration of poverty, and its elevation of labor to the dignity of a moral duty.”

— Orestes Brownson

“One should not be assigned one's identity in society by the job slot one happens to fill. If we truly believe in the dignity of labor, any task can be performed with equal pride because none can demean the basic dignity of a human being.”

— Judith Martin

“There are moments when art attains almost to the dignity of manual labor.”

— Oscar Wilde

“Each class preaches the importance of those virtues it need not exercise. The rich harp on the value of thrift, the idle grow eloquent over the dignity of labor.”

— Oscar Wilde

“How many people worldwide are victims of this type of slavery, in which the person is at the service of his or her work, while work should offer a service to people so they may have dignity. I ask my brothers and sisters in faith and all men and women of good will for a decisive choice to combat trafficking in persons, which includes "slave labor."”

— Pope Francis

“There is no worse material poverty than one that does not allow for earning one's bread and deprives one of the dignity of work. Youth unemployment, informality, and the lack of labor rights are not inevitable; they are the result of a previous social option, of an economic system that puts profit above man; if the profit is economic, to put it above humanity or above man, is the effect of a disposable culture that considers the human being in himself as a consumer good, which can be used and then discarded.”

— Pope Francis

“Americans are a very backward people, with all the real virtues of a backward people; the patriarchal simplicity and human dignity of a democracy, and a respect for labor uncorrupted by cynicism.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

“I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are invited to work; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of action.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The societal division of labor obtains the dignity of an ontological condition.”

— Herbert Marcuse