You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.
—Billie Holiday, 1956
Archive
Quotes
All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.
—Aristotle, c. 330 BCI like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
—Jerome K. Jerome, 1889The workers are the saviors of society, the redeemers of the race.
—Eugene V. Debs, 1905Plough deep while sluggards sleep.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1758In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: they must be fit for it; they must not do too much of it; and they must have a sense of success in it.
—John Ruskin, 1850Toil 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.
—Herman Melville, 1849To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891