It was something straight out of a Victorian industrial nightmare. I just found it completely dangerous and it was. You can see from the film they are not wearing any safety kit, no helmets, no safety jackets; they are wondering around the place in their shirt sleeves and flat caps. They probably thought it was woosy to wear a helmet. I found them very hard. Crusty. Quite bitter really. Working in the steel mill was a grim experience that they did for the gash. I think it was to do with kind of feeling left out of mainstream civilised development, and they were left to do the dirty work. And people thought badly of them. Despite doing the dirty work. Lionel Took, interview subject of 1967 BBC documentary re young person experiencing working life in steel mill
I was very reflective then, and didn’t seem as though I was bothered, but it was a very mundane life, mundane job. We were like robots. It’s like Groundhog Day. The same thing every second of every minute of every day. Sydney Bricknell, interview subject of 1960s documentary
Oh what a scourge and a blight is the English working man. What a dishonest lazy bastard. Only exceeded by the Welsh. And the Scots. Kenneth Williams, diary entry
If I would be a young man again and had to decide how to make my living, I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler in the hope to find that modest degree of independence still available under present circumstances. Albert Einstein
When am I going to make a living? Sade, single 1984
Go to the tea shop anywhere along the Ganga, sir, and look at the men working in that tea shop – men, I say, but better to call them human spiders that go crawling in between and under the tables with rags in their hands, crushed humans in crushed uniforms, sluggish, unshaven, in their thirties or forties or fifties but still ‘boys’. But that is your fate if you do your job well – with honesty, dedication, and sincerity, the way Gandhi would have done it, no doubt.
I did my job with near total dishonesty, lack of dedication, and insincerity – and so the tea shop was a profoundly enriching experience. Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger p51
All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind. Aristotle
Not since the 1920s has Britain been more socially unequal. As the gap between the rich and the rest has widened so has the gap in opportunity for their children. Richard Bilton, Who Gets the Best Jobs? BBC 2011
Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life. Confucius
I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. Jerome K Jerome
If you trust in yourself ... and believe in your dreams ... and follow your star ... you’ll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy. Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men
I don’t like work – no man does – but I like what is in the work – the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself not for others – what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. Steve Jobs
The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay. Steve Jobs
I’ve heard that hard work never killed anyone, but I say why take the chance? Ronald Reagan
The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
‘So the hours are pretty good then?’ he resumed.
The Vogon stared down at him as sluggish thoughts moiled around in the murky depths.
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘but now you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy. Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks. Woodrow Wilson
If their work is satisfying people don’t need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asks what Newton or Darwin did to relax, or how Bach spent his weekends. At Eden-Olympia work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work. J G Ballard, Super-Cannes
Never work. Guy Debord
You see, in this country are a number of youths who do not like to work, and the college is an excellent place for them. L Frank Baum, Ozma of Oz
When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others. Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our make-up as our appetite for status or money. It is because we are meaning-focused animals rather than simply materialistic ones that we can reasonably contemplate surrendering security for a career helping to bring drinking water to rural Malawi or might quit a job in consumer goods for one in cardiac nursing, aware that when it comes to improving the human condition a well-controlled defibrillator has the edge over even the finest biscuit. Alain de Botton, The Pleasure and Sorrows of Work
The pay is good and I can walk to work. John F Kennedy
Employment is slavery. Workers merely have a choice over where to serve their daily eight-hour sentence. Mokokoma Mokhonoana, The Confessions of a Misfit
I don’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day. Linda Evangelista
We most certainly do not and will not give protection to civil right workers. J Edgar Hoover
In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, as ‘right-to-work’. It provides no ‘rights’ and no ‘works’. Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining ... We demand this fraud be stopped. Martin Luther King
Shaftesbury was a man looking for a mission. And when in 1832 he read a series of articles in The Times about child labour he foundered. The industrial revolution was changing Britain as never before, and it seemed the inevitable price of progress that children worked oppressive, long hours for meagre wages in unregulated workplaces. And few people cared. Ian Hislop’s Age of the Do-Gooders II: Suffer the Little Children, BBC 2010
The MP for Bolton, who was a mine owner, argued that it would unjustly deprive children of their honest livelihood, and would drive them and their families into the workhouse. Others suggested that working from a young age was good and developed useful industrious habits ... Others said that the entire mining industry would collapse if it wasn’t allowed to use child labour. ibid.
To get out. To be clean. To engage your mind, which could fill your mind during working hours ... It became an absolute obsession for them. William Feaver, author Pitmen Painters: The Ashington Group 1934-1984
The work is an absolute necessity for me. I can’t put it off. Vincent van Gogh
One must work and dare if one really wants to live. Vincent van Gogh
This is Van Gogh’s first major oil painting ... of the workers, the peasants, around the farm at Nuynan. Great Artists With Tim Marlow: Van Gogh
True artists are almost the only men who do their work for pleasure. Auguste Rodin
When I begin to work on something, usually it takes me a minute to do. Andy Warhol