"I redefined success as having less to do with pushing through feelings and values to achieve a goal and more to do with nurturing the growth of my character and spirit, trusting that my greatest acheivements will come as by-products of the process."

Carol Orsborn
-

"Our values and our way of life are at the heart of our discontents, not our political and economic arrangements per se. But...this does not mean traditional political and economic concerns are irrelevant."

- Paul Wachtel

"True independence means being free from the domination of your own internal automatic behaviors, not doing what you feel like when the urge strikes."

- Nicholas Lore

"Education teaches us that we must adapt ourselves to society as it is, that we must keep pace with the dictates of "progress," that life is a race, and that we need education to get ahead of the next guy or else we'll be left behind."

- Aaron Falbel,
Growing Without Schooling
magazine, Sept./Oct. 1999


"When we reject the mindset that life is a race, we loosen the stranglehold which education has over us. Thus freed, we might begin to learn things for more authentic and natural reasons. We may then begin to fully enjoy the delight of discovery, of intellectual stimulation, of the deep and ever-changing diversity and endless wonder our world."

John O. Andersen

 

"A lot of us are working harder than we want, at things we don't like to do. Why? It figures! In order to afford the sort of existence we don't care to live."

- Bradford Angier


"…a great number of jobs, some of them quite well paid, add little to the well-being of society or to the well-being of the person in question. Why do these jobs exist? Partly because it is deemed unhealthy and dangerous (both for the individual and for society) to be out of wagework. Not because they give anyone a more fulfilling life or are necessary for society. Where does this lead us? Beyond the work ethic: the idea that human self-realisation is inherently connected to work. Work, leisure, useful versus useless work: all these dimensions must be considered by a future-directed political movement. Poetry is necessary because it makes the world more beautiful, while a lot of bureaucratic work, for example, is only alienating and expensive."

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

"The primary institutions of our society are oriented predominantly toward controlling rather than learning, rewarding individuals for performing for others rather than for cultivating their natural curiosity and impulse to learn."

- Peter M. Senge, Sloan Management Review,
Fall 1990


"It is useless to bargain any more over a few hours or days of time off, an extra year or two of retirement, while philosophizing airily about leisure...the question of the abolition of work is what is really on the table. Throughout the world, bosses have to be replaced by the free self-organization of all workers. The workers of the world must unite against the dehumanizing system of work--against the whole social process that kills the freedom and natural creativity of individuals."

- Joseph Jablonski

"The dominant work ethic in the United States is founded on the presumption that people will not work unless forced to do so by sheer life-and-death necessity. Does this imply a belief in the value of work or, beneath the surface of this loudly asserted attitude, possibly just the opposite?"

- Lynn Chancer


"What may have been dismissed as the Utopian dreams of socialists and anarchists less than a century ago, are now in the realms of reality, thanks to technology and science. Materially, socialism or anarchism, is within the reach of the "toiling masses"...if they so wish. The problem now is to persuade them to want to be anything but contented, unthinking, pay-packet slaves."

- unsigned editorial in
Freedom, 1959


"The idea of an alternative to capitalist society seems absurd, since capitalism itself seems eminently rational when viewed from the point of view of the manipulated needs that it has generated."

- Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises:
The Shaping of American
Working Class Consciousness


"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."

- Mahatma Gandhi

"If work is so terrific, how come they have to pay you to do it?"

George Carlin