The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.
Friedrich Engels, Principles of Communism (1847)
The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.
Kahlil Gibran
Work is love made visible. And if you can't work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of the people who work with joy.
Oscar Wilde
Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.
Mark Twain
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
Vincent Van Gogh
Your profession is not what brings home your paycheck. Your profession is what you were put on earth to do. With such passion and such intensity that it becomes spiritual in calling.
Elbert Hubbard
Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
Indira Gandhi
There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there.
John Ruskin
The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.
Theodore Roosevelt
Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.
Calvin Coolidge
Our real problem is not our strength today; it is rather the vital necessity of action today to ensure our strength tomorrow.
Bobby Unser
Desire! That's the one secret of every man's career. Not education. Not being born with hidden talents. Desire.
Hamilton Holt
Nothing worthwhile comes easily. Work, continuous work and hard work, is the only way to accomplish results that last.
Unknown Author
Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.
Karl Marx, 1846 Letter to Annenkov (1846)
The productive forces are the result of man’s practical energy, but that energy is in turn circumscribed by the conditions in which man is placed by the productive forces already acquired, by the form of society which exists before him, which he does not create, which is the product of the preceding generation.
Karl Marx, Reflections of a Young Man (1835)
If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people.
Karl Marx, Human Requirements and Division of Labour (1844)
Under private property ... Each tries to establish over the other an alien power, so as thereby to find satisfaction of his own selfish need. The increase in the quantity of objects is therefore accompanied by an extension of the realm of the alien powers to which man is subjected, and every new product represents a new potentiality of mutual swindling and mutual plundering.
Karl Marx, Wages of Labour (1844)
Political Economy regards the proletarian ... like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle.
Karl Marx, Human Needs & the division of Labour (1844)
Do I obey economic laws if I extract money by offering my body for sale,... — Then the political economist replies to me: You do not transgress my laws; but see what Cousin Ethics and Cousin Religion have to say about it. My political economic ethics and religion have nothing to reproach you with, but — But whom am I now to believe, political economy or ethics? — The ethics of political economy is acquisition, work, thrift, sobriety — but political economy promises to satisfy my needs. ... It stems from the very nature of estrangement that each sphere applies to me a different and opposite yardstick — ethics one and political economy another; for each is a specific estrangement of man and focuses attention on a particular field of estranged essential activity, and each stands in an estranged relation to the other.