Quotes About Salaries

“How soon, sugar, the terrible becomes routine. We've all got this dangerous built-in talent: for turning horrors into errands. You hear folks wonder how the Germans could have done it? I believe part of the answer is: They made extermination be a nine-to-five activity. You know, salaries? Lunch breaks? And the staff came and did their job and went home and ate supper and slept and woke and came back and did their job and went home and ate their supper and slept and woke and came back and did their job.
That's partly how you get anything done, especially a chore what's dreadful, dreadful.
Honey? we've all got to be real careful of what we can get used to.”

— Allan Gurganus

“Talking about independence makes me wonder, Who is truly independent in this world? A farmer who grows food is dependent on a baker, a barber, a doctor, and so on. A doctor is dependent on other people of different professions in order to survive. I am dependent and will be dependent on certain caregivers and therapists. Those caregivers and therapists need people like me to earn their bread and butter and draw their salaries. So no one is doing any favors when choosing whatever his means of livelihood is.”

— Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay

“Money won't buy happiness, but it will pay the salaries of a huge research staff to study the problem.”

— Bill Vaughan

“A large section of the idling classes of England get their incomes by believing that Jesus was born of a virgin and that Jonah swallowed a whale; and with the progress of science they were naturally finding this more and more difficult. A school of ingenious Bible-twisters arose, to invent symbolical and literary meanings for fairy tales, in order that people who no longer believed could continue with good conscience to collect the salaries of belief.”

— Upton Sinclair

“Mr. Roosevelt has gathered around him a body of public servants who are nowhere surpassed, I question whether they are anywhere equaled, for efficiency, self-sacrifice, and an absolute devotion to their country's interests. Many of them are poor men, without private means, who have voluntarily abandoned high professional ambitions and turned their backs on the rewards of business to serve their country on salaries that are not merely inadequate, but indecently so.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

“They watch her when she comes to City Hall, they watch her at the social events, they watch the way she walks, hips rolling with no suggestion of provocation but with every sense that she knows more than any of the rest. A woman like that, they seem to be thinking, a woman like that has lived.
Their wives from Orange County, they come from Minnesota or Dallas or St.Louis. They come from places with families, with sagging mothers and fathers with dead eyes and heavy-hanging brows. They carry their own promise of future slackness and clipped lips and demands. They have sisters, sisther with more babies, babies with sweet saliva hanging and more appliance and with husbands with better salaries and two cars and club membership. They iron in housedresses in front of the television set or by the radio, steam rising, matting their faces, as the children with the damp necks cling on them, sticky-handed. They are this. And Alice ... and Alice ...”

— Megan Abbott

“I feel sympathy for the working class lad. I've always championed about ticket prices and try to equate that to people's salaries.”

— Alex Ferguson

“County government can be simplified greatly by reorganizing and consolidating some of the offices, making others appointive, and reducing salaries in keeping with the salaries paid by private business for the performance of similar duties.”

— Arthur Capper

“Compared to today's salaries, our cut was minuscule but it was very good for the time.”

— Robert Vaughn

“I have fought to protect those benefits that ensure better salaries for teachers across the Nation such as grants to pay off student loans and funding for Teach for America. Still, we must all do more to show our continued appreciation for our Nation's leading role models.”

— Solomon Ortiz

“With respect to teachers' salaries ... Poor teachers are grossly overpaid and good teachers grossly underpaid. Salary schedules tend to be uniform and determined far more by seniority.”

— Milton Friedman

“At Ozon, salaries are evaluated every year based on market benchmarks which are gender neutral.”

— Maelle Gavet

“If trustees feel it is in their charity's interest to pay high salaries to attract talented people, then they should have the courage of their conviction and explain their decisions publicly.”

— William Shawcross

“It's outrageous that many enlisted people qualify for food stamps because military salaries are so low.”

— Patricia Schroeder

“I think we spend too much on K-12 education a.k.a. teachers' salaries. It's the only industry where you never see any productivity increases.”

— Peter Brimelow

“Who is telling us about the false self today? Who is even equipped tell us? Many clergy have not figured this out for themselves, since even ministry can be a career decision or an attraction to "religion" more than the result of an encounter with God or themselves. Formal religious status can maintain the false self rather effectively, especially if there are a lot of social payoffs like special respect, titles, salaries, a good self image, or nice costumes. It is no accident that the religious "Pharisees" became the symbolic bad guys in the Jesus story.”

— Richard Rohr

“We all love people who give credit to others for their success. Companies would probably do better with CEOs who didn't blow their own horn and ask for ridiculous salaries and new yachts every year.”

— Adora Svitak

“Whenever I think of the high salaries we are paid as film actors, I think it is for the travel, the time away, and any trouble you get into through being well known. It's not for the acting, that's for sure.”

— Bill Murray

“When I was 22, I was thrown out of graduate school and then fired from three jobs in a row at higher and higher salaries where I saved nothing.”

— James Altucher

“They're making a song and dance because that serves their immediate interests. But what will happen tomorrow? They will have to pay salaries and pensions.”

— Eduard Shevardnadze

“There are absolutely lots of teachers who are trying to come into the profession, but they are not attracted enough to say, 'I'm going to switch careers to do it,' or they are often not retained ... because the salaries and the compensation aren't there to make it happen.”

— Melinda Gates

“Whites have more than eleven times the net worth or wealth of African Americans. They make greater salaries. Our unemployment rate is twice theirs. You look at the prison system and who that's chewing up.”

— Randall Robinson

“My wife and I have purchased two hybrids. We bought a 3 kw photovoltaic unit. We recycle and offset our carbon emissions on the Internet. We turn things off. But we also spend two nice salaries every year, and here's the dirty little secret - our environmental footprint is HUGE, I'm sure. We've all got to do what we can in our individual lives, but we've also got to drive the systemic changes that will make the big differences.”

— James Gustave Speth

“Let's zoom in on a particular form of synesthesia as an example. For most of us, February and Wednesday do not have any particular place in space. But some synesthetes experience precise locations in relation to their bodies for numbers, time units, and other concepts involving sequence or ordinality. They can point to the spot where the number 32 is, where December floats, or where the year 1966 lies.8 These objectified three-dimensional sequences are commonly called number forms, although more precisely the phenomenon is called spatial sequence synesthesia.9 The most common types of spatial sequence synesthesia involve days of the week, months of the year, the counting integers, or years grouped by decade. In addition to these common types, researchers have encountered spatial configurations for shoe and clothing sizes, baseball statistics, historical eras, salaries, TV channels, temperature, and more.”

— David Eagleman

“Today's baseball players are walking conglomerates. They have fantastic salaries, multiple investments, but we had one thing they don't have today, the train ride. We didn't always like it, but those rides kept us close as a team and as friends. Something you can't get on a two hour plane ride that used to take you fifteen hours on a train.”

— Duke Snider

“By the same token, frozen dinners, a microwave oven, a dishwasher, and an illegal immigrant hired to clean the house and take one's cat to the vet would have seemed like the epitome of materialism in another time, but now provide the only means available for two-career couples to work hard enough at their jobs to earn the salaries they need to pay for those labor-saving amenities.”

— Robert Wuthnow

“We have decreased the salaries of everybody who partakes in politics, from the president to the prime minister to the MPs [members of Parliament]. We have cut expenditures that have to do with parliament. Everybody knows we are serious.”

— Antonis Samaras

“Lobbyists in Washington are making six figure salaries selling our government out to the corporate interests and we just sit and smile as if nothing is happening while the poor folks are getting poorer and their pharmaceutical bills rise.”

— Hal Holbrook

“We preach free enterprise capitalism. We believe in it, we give our lives in war for it, but the closest most of us come to profiting from it are a few miserable shares of stock in a company that doesn't pay large enough dividends to keep a small mouse in cheese. The truth is, most of us are job serfs. At a time when invested capital returns 20 to 30 percent, we have no capital. We only have our wages and salaries, and a debt so high that something like 20c on every dollar we earn is spent to pay off what we owe.”

— Nicholas Von Hoffman

“Skills are expensive in Africa, best people are on American salaries.”

— Sunil Bharti Mittal

“I've noticed two things about men who get big salaries. They are almost invariably men who, in conversation or in conference, are adaptable. They quickly get the other fellow's view. They are more eager to do this than to express their own ideas. Also, they state their own point of view convincingly.”

— John Hallock, Jr.

“Global warmers predict that global warming is coming, and our emissions are to blame. They do that to keep us worried about our role in the whole thing. If we aren't worried and guilty, we might not pay their salaries. It's that simple.”

— Kary Mullis

“The American middle class, it seems to me, is looking to politicians now to satisfy a pretty basic - and urgent - level of need. Yet people in the upper middle class - with their excellent health benefits, schools, salaries, retirement plans, nannies and private afterschool programs - have journeyed so far from that level of need that, it often seems to me, they literally cannot hear what resonates with the middle class. That creates a problematic blind spot for those who write, edit or produce what comes to be known about our politicians and their policies.”

— Judith Warner

“Modern capitalism is just as subversive as Marxism. The materialistic view of life on which both systems are based is identical. As long as we only talk about economic classes, profit, salaries, and production, and as long as we believe that real human progress is determined by a particular system of distribution of wealth and goods, then we are not even close to what is essential.”

— Julius Evola

“There is no better way to return the matter of taxation to full public discusssion than to repeal the withholding taxes on wages and salaries. Only when the American people are confronted with the enormous excesses of government in a personal and direct way - by an annual bill for services rendered - will they be able to make an informed judgment about which services they want and which ones they can do without.”

— Karl Hess

“Imagine if the political elites in our country were forced to endure the same conditions at the airport as business travelers, families, senior citizens, and the rest of us. Perhaps this problem could be quickly resolved if every cabinet secretary, every member of Congress, and every department head in the Obama administration were forced to submit to the same degrading screening process as the people who pay their salaries.”

— Ron Paul

“There's not gonna be any tuition cuts. There aren't gonna be any drastic reductions in salaries. And in fact when the subject of cuts comes up, the first thing that the opponents of cuts say, "You can't cut this faculty. You can't cut the salaries. You wouldn't save enough money, you can't go there."”

— Rush Limbaugh

“I leave the governor's office next week, and with it public life[which] has been on the whole a pleasant one. But for ten years and over my salaries have not equalled my expenses, and there has been a feeling of responsibility, a lack of independence, and a necessary neglect of my family and personal interests and comfort, which make the prospect of a change comfortable to think of.”

— Rutherford B. Hayes

“Keep salaries low and equity high. Keep the organization as flat as you can.”

— Sam Altman

“The idea of let's all share the pain equally, or let's freeze salaries altogether - it's ass-backwards. It's absolutely ass-backwards.”

— Jack Welch

“Overwhelming the majority of European citizens are unhappy with the social deal they get, yes; and that is why they are so angry with their governments. Because they want more, much more! They couldn't care less that their benefits, salaries and other privileges, have been, for decades and centuries 'subsidized' by the plunder of other parts of the planet; that they are paid for by blood.”

— Andre Vltchek

“Sometimes I hear news about the huge dollars involved with CEO pay and corporate-management salaries, and I'm mystified at how someone can justify taking that much at the cost of other people's livelihoods. In a bizarre way, I'm almost kind of curious, like "How can they absolve themselves and enjoy their wealth?" I don't understand it.”

— Eddie Vedder

“For decades now, the Democrats have had a good gig buying the votes of government workers with outrageous salaries, benefits and work rules - and then sticking productive earners with the bill. But, now, we're out of money.”

— Ann Coulter

“Government workers think the job of everyone else in the economy is to protect their high salaries, crazy work rules and obscene pensions. They self-righteously lecture us about public service, the children, a 'living wage' all in the service of squeezing more money from the taxpayer to fund their breathtakingly selfish job arrangements.”

— Ann Coulter

“I think today's athletes generally are spoiled by what's happened to salaries, but I also think that golfers have maintained the best demeanor of any sport.”

— Arnold Palmer

“New Year, the season for changes in positions and advances in salaries, approaches. If you have in your employ some who deserve more salary, do not compel them to go through the unpleasant ordeal of asking a raise, but, rather, voluntarily increase their remuneration. A raise that comes from the boss without asking is worth a lot more than one that has to be gouged out of him. Is it not true that a great many employers who would not dream of overcharging their customers have no qualms whatever about underpaying their employees if the latter will submit without protest?”

— B.C. Forbes

“Would you exalt your profession, exalt those who labor with you ... increase the salaries of the women engaged in the noble work of educating our future presidents, senators and congressmen.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“Today, the United States is No. 1 in corporate profits, No. 1 in CEO salaries, No. 1 in childhood poverty and No. 1 in income and wealth inequality in the industrialized world.”

— Bernie Sanders

“We have a greedy cycle where Human Rights Commissions fine citizens in order to pay their own salaries so they can employ more Human Rights Commissions. It's a bounty system where the prizes are business owner's heads. And so as restaurants go broke, tourists get stabbed. That's human rights in New York. And perhaps America.”

— Greg Gutfeld

“The real University ... has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries, and receives no material dues ... The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries.”

— Robert M. Pirsig