Unemployment Quotes

“I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions--poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed--which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.

It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“People are wrong when they think that an unemployed man only worries about losing his wages; on the contrary, an illiterate man, with the work habit in his bones, needs work even more than he needs money. An educated man can put up with enforced idleness, which is one of the worst evils of poverty. But a man like Paddy, with no means of filling up time, is as miserable out of work as a dog on the chain. That is why it is such nonsense to pretend that those who have 'come down in the world' are to be pitied above all others.
The man who really merits pity is the man who has been down from the start,
and faces poverty with a blank, resourceless mind.”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“Our country is the best country in the world. We are swimming in prosperity and our President is the best president in the world. We have larger apples and better cotton and faster and more beautiful machines. This makes us the greatest country in the world. Unemployment is a myth. Dissatisfaction is a fable. In preparatory school America is beautiful. It is the gem of the ocean and it is too bad. It is bad because people believe it all. Because they become indifferent. Because they marry and reproduce and vote and they know nothing.”
― John Cheever

“If heaven really exists: then heaven is the job, hell is unemployment, while life is merely an interview.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“A day unemployed is like a bagel- even when it's bad, it's still pretty good...”
― CrimethInc., Evasion

“As long as we remain vigilant at building our internal abundance—an abundance of integrity, an abundance of forgiveness, an abundance of service, an abundance of love—then external lack is bound to be temporary.”
― Marianne Williamson, Everyday Grace

“And that's just the beginning. More and more, conventional wisdom says that the responsible thing is to make the unemployed suffer. And while the benefits from inflicting pain are an illusion, the pain itself will be all too real.”
― Paul Krugman

“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“I suppose there hasn’t been a single month since the war, in any trade you care to name, in which there weren’t more men than jobs. It’s brought a peculiar, ghastly feeling into life. It’s like on a sinking ship when there are nineteen survivors and fourteen lifebelts. But is there anything particularly modern in that, you say? Has it anything to do with the war? Well, it feels as if it had. The feeling that you’ve got to be everlastingly fighting and hustling, that you’ll never get anything unless you grab it from somebody else, that there’s always somebody after your job, that next month or the month after they’ll be reducing staff and it’s you that’ll get the bird – that, I swear, didn’t exist in the old life before the war.”
― George Orwell, Coming up for Air

“Those who had the remaining jobs would have to buy the cheapest stuff possible with their drastically reduced wages, and in order for the manufacturers to keep that stuff cheap, it would have to be made by fifteen-year-olds in China.”
― Michael Francis Moore

“Eric, you need to look at the whole picture," the PM said. "You look at the jobless as a huge pile of scrap and you're looking for what can be recycled. That's good. That's your job. But what you don't realise is that this pile of scrap itself serves a purpose. I need my zeros, Eric. They put fear in people; fear of crime and terrorism. They are a stark reminder to the stakeholders that what they despise today, they may end up joining tomorrow. It keeps them obedient. Remember that!”
― Mark Cantrell, Citizen Zero

“I cannot tell you how many quiet mornings I have spent sitting around hotel rooms and furnished apartments in the United States and Mexico, smoking cigarettes, plunking the guitar, and watching Perry Mason--telling myself, "Well, at least I don't have a day job. And there is nothing wrong with that. I am not guilty of anything. Perry would see that in a minute.”
― Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy

“Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not the fundamental right to labour the earth returns to the unemployed.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“They are closing the mine in two weeks, they say. Six days a week bumping down in the gondola, pecking out the rocks and hauling them back up, doing it again the next day for twenty-seven years, one cave-in, three thin raises, and a failed strike. Where am I going to go every day, what am I going to do with all that sunshine?”
― Lou Beach, 420 Characters

“A CEO shouldn't get several hundred times the salary that the janitor is paid. An athlete shouldn't get several hundred times the salary that the waterboy is paid. A filmstar shouldn't get several hundred times the salary that the crew at the bottom are paid.

I understand if you are not yet civilized enough to flatten the field completely – for you are an infantile species after all. But at the very least, do your best to reduce the gap - that is, if you intend to be human someday.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Corazon Calamidad: Obedient to None, Oppressive to None

“If you call yourself an entrepreneur but you haven’t created a stable job for yourself in the context of your business - you’re not an entrepreneur, you’re an unemployed person with sporadic sources of income.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

“Technical Education creates men of actions rather than academics.”
― Shakil Kamboh

“Technical Education is a weapon to defend the humanity against hunger, poverty and large scale unemployment.”
― Shakil Kamboh

“Why does Joe Normie think it’s a litmus test for morality if one returns one’s shopping cart? Big-box stores put out of business local retailers, they automated their systems to reduce employees, and they got customers to be their own cashiers without getting paid for their labor, and yet to prove I’m a good person, I’m supposed to do more unpaid work for them to streamline their operation?”
― Jarod Kintz, Eggs, they’re not just for breakfast

“there some coloureds, negroes, blacks, cd make a living big enough to leave there to come here: but no one went there much any more for all sorts of reasons. the big reason being immigration restrictions & unemployment. nowadays, immigration restrictions of every kind apply to any non-european persons who want to go there from here. just like unemployment applies to most non-european persons without titles of nobility or north american university training. some who want to go there from here risk fetching trouble with the customs authority there. or later with the police, who, can tell who's not from there cuz the shoes are pointed & laced strange/the pants be for august & yet it's january/the accent is patterned for port-au-prince, but working in crown heights. what makes a person comfortably ordinary here cd make him dangerously conspicuous there.

so some go to london or amsterdam or paris, where they are so many no one tries to tell who is from where. still the far right wing of every there prints lil pamphlets that say everyone from here shd leave there & go back where they came from.”
― Ntozake Shange

“...by the time Malcolm Fraser came to power, neoliberals working for Treasury quietly redefined 'full employment' to mean a rate of just 95 per cente employment at any time. Unsurprisingly, it's a habit of neoliberal governments to make the experience of unemployment as punitive and humiliating as possible, to discourage people from risking it. (p. 64-5”
― Sally McManus, On Fairness

“...by the time Malcolm Fraser came to power, neoliberals working for Treasury quietly redefined 'full employment' to mean a rate of just 95 per cent employment at any time. Unsurprisingly, it's a habit of neoliberal governments to make the experience of unemployment as punitive and humiliating as possible, to discourage people from risking it.”
― Sally McManus, On Fairness

“Called by the fattoria committee, the unemployed braccianti arrive in force on the lands that the owners refuse to improve. In spite of the presence of the owners, the superintendents, or their agents, the workers carry out the work; they then demand their salary (pay ble to the legal investment fund). In the backwards strike, the workers work against the wishes of the boss, and their work increases the productivity of the soil. This is doubly paradoxical when compared to the conventional notion of the strike. Thus, at Empoli, between Florence and Sienna, 70,000 cubic meters of grading, ditches, and other work has been carried out by the "strikers" under the direction of the fattorie committees. The latter paid the workers directly, withdrawing 4% from the money deposited by them into the bank and representing the sale of farm products. in all the areas of Tuscany where the committees are active, they have organized the planting of vines, the work of drainage or irrigation, the repair of buildings, and whatever else might be required. They even established, in individual locations, nascent production cooperatives for clearing the land and improving uncultivated or poorly cultivated soil, which assumes their presence on these lands notwithstanding the will of the owner.”
― Henri Lefebvre, On the Rural: Economy, Sociology, Geography

“Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”
― Andrew Mellon

“According to Albert Einstein and Indian Government, Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned; According to me, what remains is poverty and unemployment.”
― P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar

“Make your new path.”
― Bald Solomon, Path Blocked: Overcoming Unemployment

“البته این روش صغراباجی برای حل مشکل بی‌کاری معروف بود و به خاطر شغل سازمانی‌اش، که دخالت در کار دیگران و توصیه های صدمن یک غاز بود، اعتقاد داشت وقتی کسی بی‌کار است و کاری بلد نیست اگر ازدواج کند همه چیزش درست می‌شود. یعنی به جای یادگرفتن کار و آموزش، از طریق آمیزش می‌توان مشکل یک بی‌کار را حل کرد.”
― مهرداد صدقی, آبنبات هل‌دار

“The first thought of writing this book came to me two years ago after I had driven through the mining district of Lanarkshire. The journey took me through Hamilton, Airdrie and Motherwell. It was a warm, overcast summer day; groups of idle, sullen-looking young men stood at the street corners; smaller groups were wandering among the blue-black ranges of pit-dumps which in that region are the substitute for nature; the houses looked empty and unemployed like the tenants; and the road along which the car stumbled was pitted and rent, as if it had recently been under shell-fire. Everything had the look of a Sunday which had lasted for many years, during which the bells had forgotten to ring - a disused, slovenly everlasting Sunday.”
― Edwin Muir, Scottish Journey

“Unemployment benefits are cut off to the long term unemployed in the USA!”
― Steven Magee

“Poverty ... is a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilisation. It is the lot of man – it is the source of wealth, since without poverty there would be no labour, and without labour there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.”
― Patrick Colquhoun