This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The dignity of labor depends not on what you do, but how you do it.
Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL
They change their sky not their mind who cross the sea. A busy idleness possesses us: we seek a happy life, with ships and carriages: the object of our search is present with us.
Change | Happy | Idleness | Life | Life | Mind | Object | Present | Search | Wisdom |
If at any time all labor should cease, and all existing provision be equally divided among the people, at the end of a single year there could scarcely be one human being left alive - all would have perished by want of subsistence... Universal idleness would speedily result in universal ruin; and ... useless labor is, in this respect, the same as idleness.
Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
Consideration | Labor | Wisdom |
Karl Marx (1818-1883) German Philosopher, Socialist and Friedrich Engels
Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriation.
It is to labor, and to labor only, that man owes everything possessed of exchangeable value. Labor is the talisman that has raised him from the condition of the savage; that has changed the desert and the forest into cultivated fields; that has covered the earth with cities, and the ocean with ships that has give us plenty, comfort, and elegance, instead of want, misery, and barbarism.
Barbarism | Comfort | Earth | Elegance | Labor | Man | Plenty | Wisdom |
Equality is one of the most consummate scoundrels that ever crept from the brain of a political juggler - a fellow who thrusts his hand into the pocket of honest industry or enterprising talent, and squanders their hard-earned profits on profligate idleness or indolent stupidity.
The great inequality in manner of living, the extreme idleness of some, and the excessive labor of others, the easiness of exciting and gratifying our sensual appetites, the too exquisite foods of the wealthy which overheat and fill them with indigestion, and, on the other hand, the unwholesome food of the poor, often, bad as it is, insufficient for their needs, which induces them, when opportunity offers, to eat voraciously and overcharge their stomachs; all these, together with sitting up late, and excesses of every kind, immoderate transports of every passion, fatigue, mental exhaustion, the innumerable pains and anxieties inseparable from every condition of life, by which the mind of man is incessantly tormented; these are too fatal proofs that the greater part of our ills are our own making, and that we might have avoided them nearly all by adhering to that simple, uniform and solitary manner of life which nature prescribed.
Extreme | Idleness | Indigestion | Inequality | Labor | Life | Life | Man | Mind | Nature | Opportunity | Passion | Wisdom |