Well, it's a good life and a good world, all said and done, if you don't weaken.

Proletarians of the world, look into the depths of your own beings, seek out the truth and realise it yourselves: you will find it nowhere else.

The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.

Sometimes the gap between what you are and what you want to be is a little piece of paper called your college degree. So jump.

Ex-slaves, in large part, shared a different economic vision. They were "always on the move," searching for family, denying their labor to "dishonest or oppressive employers," and asserting their independence through their mobility. Rather than staying in place, working as much as possible for a high a wage as possible, and thus possibly accumulating a greater array of material good, a large number of freedpeople sought not to maximize income but to minimize the amount of "time spent at work on other people's behalf.

Historians have generally described the coming of industrialization in terms of changes in paid work. The transformation has been framed as one from a community of comparatively independent producers to a class of wage workers.

African American women actively contested white constructions of black female labor.

We are just peasants with money.

But the reality is that chav-hate is a lot more than snobbery. It is a class war. It is an expression of the belief that everyone should become middle class and embrace middle-class values and lifestyles, leaving those who don't to be ridiculed and hated. It is about refusing to acknowledge anything of worth in working-class Britain, and systematically ripping it to shreds in newspapers, on TV, on Facebook, and in general conversation. This is what the demonization of the working class means.

We are endowed with different kinds of gifts for different kinds of services.

Europe, the land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts. The land where the economy gets to stagger all over the continent.

You can work to create a bright future.

Let these men sing out their songs,they've been walking all day long,all their fortune's spent and gone...silver dollar in the subway station;quarters for the papers for the jobs.

He’s always complaining about the fucking recession and how the government is working against people like him. He calls himself working class, which I think is a bit ironic since he doesn’t work.

As to the 'Left' I'll say briefly why this was the finish for me. Here is American society, attacked under open skies in broad daylight by the most reactionary and vicious force in the contemporary world, a force which treats Afghans and Algerians and Egyptians far worse than it has yet been able to treat us. The vaunted CIA and FBI are asleep, at best. The working-class heroes move, without orders and at risk to their lives, to fill the moral and political vacuum. The moral idiots, meanwhile, like Falwell and Robertson and Rabbi Lapin, announce that this clerical aggression is a punishment for our secularism. And the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, hitherto considered allies on our 'national security' calculus, prove to be the most friendly to the Taliban and Al Qaeda.Here was a time for the Left to demand a top-to-bottom house-cleaning of the state and of our covert alliances, a full inquiry into the origins of the defeat, and a resolute declaration in favor of a fight to the end for secular and humanist values: a fight which would make friends of the democratic and secular forces in the Muslim world. And instead, the near-majority of 'Left' intellectuals started sounding like Falwell, and bleating that the main problem was Bush's legitimacy. So I don't even muster a hollow laugh when this pathetic faction says that I, and not they, are in bed with the forces of reaction.

The 'free' laborer, thanks to the development of capitalistic production, agrees, i.e. is compelled by social conditions, to sell the whole of his active life, his birthright for a mass of pottage.

I'm not working-class: I come from the criminal classes.

Even now when I'm furious, what I would like to do is to punch the infuriating person flat on the ground. That solves nothing I know, and I spent a lot of time understanding my own violence, which is not of the pussycat kind. There are people who could never commit murder; I am not one of those people. It's better to know it, better to know who you are, and what lies in you, and what you could do, might do, under extreme provocation.

Belonging to the working class is the economy’s punishment for those who did what they were told to do in class.

America's indispensable working class existed as property beyond the realm of politics, leaving white Americans free to trumpet their love of freedom and democratic values.

The road to the new society had lengthened and become overgrown sadly since 1904. The working class in many thousands had been shown its errors in thinking, but persisted in them. Very well: the working class must have the rigours of capitalism, and if the rigours were harsh - it serves them right for not accepting socialism.

O.K., so I'm not so smart. I'm working class. But it's the working class that keeps the world running, and it's the working class that gets exploited. What the hell kind of revolution have you got just tossing out big words that working-class people can't understand? What the hell kind of social revolution is that? I mean, I'd like to make the world a better place, too. If somebody's really being exploited, we've got to put a stop to it. That's what I believe, and that's why I ask questions.

The emancipation of the working class can only be achieved by the working class itself — without the assistance of governments.

One guy yelled at me, 'You stupid bitch, how do you live like that with nothing in your brain?' Well, that did it. I wasn't going to put up with that. Ok, I'm not so smart. I'm working class. But it's the working class that keeps the world running, and it's the working classes that get exploited. What kind of revolution is it that just throws out big words that working-class people can't understand? What kind of crap social revolution is that? I mean, I'd like to make the world a better place, too. If somebody's really being exploited, we've got to put a stop to it. That's what I believe, and that's why I ask questions. Am I right, or what?

Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.

I think the worst sort of time travel is how the clock speeds up when I'm on my break.

You can find fulfillment in your work, work with all your heart.