I am a friend of the workingman, and I would rather be his friend than be one.

Toil is man’s allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that’s more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.

It is shameful and inhuman to treat men like chattels to make money by, or to regard them merely as so much muscle or physical power.

The workers are the saviors of society, the redeemers of the race.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

“Work” does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.

A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can’t think of anything else to do.

I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours, a fixed salary, and very little original thinking to do.

Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.

The best augury of a man’s success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.

Man must be doing something, or fancy that he is doing something, for in him throbs the creative impulse; the mere basker in the sunshine is not a natural, but an abnormal man.

Man is a tool-using animal. Nowhere do you find him without tools; without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat eight hours a day, nor drink for eight hours a day, nor make love for eight hours.