CLAWS Quotes: Page One

"In these languid midsummer days, humans who feel the urge to take it easy but remain burdened by a recalcitrant work ethic might do well to consider that laziness is perfectly natural, perfectly sensible and shared by nearly every other species on the planet."

- Busy as a bee? Then who's doing the work?
Natalie Angier, New York Times, 30 July 1991



"...the only security a person has is what he himself [sic] can do. There's little security in a job, working for somebody else. I like to control my fate as much as possible. I don't believe the answer lies in making money."

- Steven Simonyi-Gindele, quoted in Studs Terkel's Working



"Some politicians, looking for a quick fix, shout that we need 'jobs, jobs, jobs.' But such simplistic slogans simply do not cut deeply enough. They avoid the deeper questions that must be asked of work at this critical juncture in human and Earth history."

- Matthew Fox, The Reinvention of Work



"Why do we work ? From necessity or love ? If the former, then our world is failing us, we are being exploited, being made slaves for the benefit of others. The ethic that work is a 'good thing' is a throwback to a Victorian mentality of puritanical pain and denial of our humanity, an ethic that is so far removed from the reality of our human nature as to be pathological."

- CALResCo, Freeing Us From Labor



"I don't think there is, or ever again can be, a cure for unemployment. I propose that unemployment is not a disease, but the natural, healthy functioning of an advanced technological society."

- The Rich Economy (from The Illuminati Papers)
Robert Anton Wilson, 1980



"I've been retired since I was six years old...One definition of happiness is "having as little separation between your work and play as possible. So if I retired, I would retire to what I'm doing now anyway. If I were independently wealthy, I don't think anything would change in my life. I might buy an extra pair of jeans, or perhaps start a radical think tank."

- Paul Krassner, interviewed by Ron Chepesiuk
(from Sixties Radicals: Then and Now, p. 40)



"Isn't it obvious that the whole purpose of machines is to get rid of work? When you get rid of the work required for producing basic necessities, you have leisure - time for fun or for new and creative explorations and adventures. But with the characteristic blindness of those who cannot distinguish symbol from reality, we allow our machinery to put people out of work - not in the sense of being at leisure but in the sense of having no money and having to accept public welfare."

- Alan Watts, "Wealth vs. Money",
from Does It Matter?



"I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached ..."

"... the road to happiness and prosperity lies in the organised diminuation of work."

- In Praise of Idleness
Bertrand Russell, 1932



"20 years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just 5% of the work then being done - presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now - would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter."

"A worker is a part-time slave."

The Abolition of Work
- Bob Black, 1985


"…working harder is not working. Most of our current leadership will need to be dragged kicking and screaming into the Age of Leisure. Change must come from ordinary people."

- Bruce O'Hara


"You cannot motivate the best people with money. Money is just a way to keep score. The best people in any field are motivated by passion."

- Eric Raymond,
from an interview in Fast Company magazine



"Contrary to the ideologically conditioned theory shared by sociologists, psychologists, and policy analysts ... recipients of guaranteed annual income who are relieved of most obligations to engage in labor do not fall apart."

- The Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and
the Dogma of Work
Stanley Aronowitz & William DiFazio, 1994




"History's political and economic power structures have always abhorred 'idle people' as potential troublemakers. Yet nature never abhors seemingly idle trees, grass, snails, coral reefs, and clouds in the sky."

"We find all the no-life-support-wealth-producing people going to their 1980s jobs in their cars and buses, spending trillions of dollars' worth of petroleum daily to get to their no-wealth-producing jobs. It doesn't take a computer to tell you that it will save both Universe and humanity trillions of dollars a day to pay them handsomely to stay at home."

- Critical Path
Buckminster Fuller, 1982


"Poverty is not created by the poor but by the institutions and policies that we, the better off, have established. We can solve the problem not by means of the old concepts but by adopting radically new ones."

- Muhammad Yunus




"From a historical perspective, the cultural norm placing a moral value on doing a good job because work has intrinsic value for its own sake was a relatively recent development.... Work, for much of the ancient history of the human race, has been hard and degrading. Working hard - in the absence of compulsion - was not the norm for Hebrew, classical, or medieval cultures... It was not until the Protestant Reformation that physical labor became culturally acceptable for all persons, even the wealthy."

Historical Context of the Work Ethic
- Roger B. Hill


"If work were so pleasant, the rich would keep it for themselves."

- Mark Twain


"Education reform" won't work. We can tweak this or modify that, but it still will be an inherently flawed concept. If we don't want to eat soup, changing the spices in the soup to make it taste better won't change the fact that it's still soup. In Ishmael author Daniel Quinn's words, this amounts to improving prison conditions. Enough improving prison conditions. It's time to talk about leaving the prison!"

- Michael Fogler,
in Simple Living newsletter #27,
"What are we Preparing For?"




"We must begin to question the meaning of work and think about what it means to us personally. We must value our 'unproductive' labor - child care, house work, gardening, conversation, reading, cultural pursuits, art making, musing, day dreaming, napping, wasting time. All of these are necessary for a civilized society."

- The Right to be Lazy
Poppy Dixon


"I'm a free soul who hates paying attention to things I am not interested in. Consequently, I have rarely been comfortable in the role of 'employee.'"

- Steve Solomon



"All of my life I have thoroughly enjoyed working... The worst punishment for me would have been if my work had been taken away."

- Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz
(Autobiography, 1959)




"28 And why take ye thought for raiment?
Consider the lilies of the field,
how they grow;
they toil not, neither do they spin:

29 And yet I say unto you,
That even Solomon in all his glory
was not arrayed like one of these.

30 Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into
the oven, shall he not much more clothe you,
O ye of little faith?"

- Jesus of Nazareth

Creating Livable Alternatives To Wage Slavery

http://www.whywork.org


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