labor

There is no labor a person does that is undignified;  if they do it right.

The day is short, the task is great, the laborers are lazy, the wage is abundant and the master is urgent.

Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft ...and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

An unreflective passion for social justice may be one of the biggest obstacles to creating peace and prosperity in the 21^st century. While there are most certainly factory owners in China whom we would rightly regard as criminal in their treatment of their workers, it is very important not to confuse these incidents with the phenomenon of globalization. It is a good thing that Wal-Mart is encouraging more humane standards in its supplier's factories. And yet it is also important to remember that Wal-Mart's "vast pipeline that gives non-U.S. companies direct access to the American market" is a vast pipeline of prosperity for the hundreds of millions of rural Chinese whose lives are more difficult than we can imagine.

Much of the criticism of economic globalization has centered on factory labor abuses. But the majority of the world's poor are not employed in factories; they are self-employed -- as peasant farmers, rural peddlers, urban hawkers, and small producers, usually involved in agriculture and small trade in the world's vast "informal" economy ("informal" because economists have difficulty measuring it.).

The work of a person laboring in some humble occupation is no less relevant to the well-being of society than that of, for example, a doctor, a teacher, a monk, or a nun. All human endeavor is potentially great and noble. So long as we carry out our work with good motivation, thinking, “My work is for others,” it will be of benefit to the wider community. But when concern for others’ feelings and welfare is missing, our activities tend to become spoiled. Through lack of basic human feeling, religion, politics, economics, and so on can be rendered dirty. Instead of serving humanity, they become agents of destruction.

"The new king [Alexander the Great] should perform acts so important and glorious as would make the poets and musicians of future ages labour and sweat to describe and celebrate him."

There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.

He who labors diligently need never despair; for all things are accomplished by diligence and labor.