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Labor Quotes

As for a limit to one's labors, I, for one, do not recognize any for a high-minded man, except that the labors themselves should lead to noble accomplishments.

My grandfather was an autoworker, and I have a weapon he manufactured to protect himself from the company that he would carry to work. It's a big iron pipe with a hunk of lead on the head. I think about how far we've come as companies from those days, where workers had to protect themselves from the company.

We will build new roads and highways and bridges and airports and tunnels and railways all across our wonderful Nation. We will get our people off of welfare and back to work, rebuilding our country with American hands and American labor. We will follow two simple rules: Buy American and hire American. We will seek friendship and good will with the nations of the world, but we do so with the understanding that it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first.

On immigration, I will direct the Department of Labor to investigate all abuses of visa programs that undercut the American worker. On ethics reform, as part of our plan to Drain the Swamp, we will impose a five-year ban on executive officials becoming lobbyists after they leave the Administration - and a lifetime ban on executive officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government. These are just a few of the steps we will take to reform Washington and rebuild our middle class. I will provide more updates in the coming days, as we work together to Make America Great Again for everyone.

Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this triumph is only the prelude to the triumph of labour over capital.

Unity must be won, and only the workers, the class-conscious workers themselves can win it - by stubborn and persistent effort.

In its struggle for power the proletariat has no other weapon but organisation. Disunited by the rule of anarchic competition in the bourgeois world, ground down by forced labour for capital, constantly thrust back to the 'lower depths' of utter destitution, savagery, and degeneration, the proletariat can, and inevitably will become an invincible force only through its ideological unification on the principles of Marxism being reinforced by the material unity of organisation, which welds millions of toilers into an army of the working class.

Capitalism is commodity production at the highest stage of development, when labor power itself becomes a commodity. The growth of internal exchange, and particularly of international exchange, is a special feature of capitalism. The uneven and spasmodic character of the development of individual enterprises, of individual branches of industry and individual countries, is inevitable under the capitalist system.

Trade unions and strikes cannot help in times of crisis when there is no demand for this "commodity", they cannot change the conditions which, convert labour-power into a commodity and which doom the masses of working people to dire need and unemployment. To change these conditions, a revolutionary struggle against the whole existing social and political system is necessary; the industrial crisis will convince very many workers of the justice of this statement.

The progressive historical role of capitalism may be summed up in two brief propositions: increase in the productive forces of social labour, and the socialisation of that labour. But both these facts manifest themselves in extremely diverse processes in different branches of the national economy.

By destroying small-scale production, capital leads to an increase in productivity of labour and to the creation of a monopoly position for the associations of big capitalists.

Labour is the human element which makes the fruitful seasons of the earth useful to men.

Improved productivity means less human sweat, not more.

Paying good wages is not charity at all-it is the best kind of business.

Man minus the Machine is a slave; Man plus the Machine is a freeman.

One way to think about Walmart is a very large river of merchandise, moving from raw material to a customer and anytime that river of merchandise has imperfections, we either have an out of stock or we have some sort of overstock that creates additional costs, labor markdowns, accidents, damages.

In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars.

I have often thought how much happier I should have been, if instead of accepting of a command under such circumstances, I had taken my musket upon my shoulders and entered the rank, or if I could have justified the measure of posterity, and my own conscience, had retired to the back country, and lived in a wigwam. If I shall be able to rise superior to these, and many other difficulties which might be enumerated, I shall most religiously believe that the finger of Providence is in it, to blind the eyes of our enemies; for surely if we get well through this month, it must be for want of their knowing the disadvantages we labor under.

Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire, called conscience.

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.