Labor Saving Quotes & Sayings

O yes! a machine for saving work, is it? He'd invent that, I'll be bound; let a nigger alone for that, any time. They are all labor-saving machines themselves, every one of 'em. No, he shall tramp! — Harriet Beecher Stowe

Technology, while providing us many advantages, encourages us to race through our days so that we no longer know what we'd do if we were to slow down. Labor-saving devices seem not only to have failed to enhance the quality of our lives and free up more time, but get between us and the immediate, sensory pleasures of life and increase the pressures on us to do more. Many of us feel cut off from life's blessings, from our neighbors, from the wonders of nature, and from our sense of our own significance in the scheme of things. Modern life leaves us spiritually starved — Kathleen A. Kendall-Tackett

What Friedan gave to the world was, "the problem that has no name." She not only named it but dissected it. The advances of science, the development of labor-saving appliances, the development of the suburbs: all had come together to offer women in the 1950s a life their mothers had scarcely dreamed of, free from rampant disease, onerous drudgery, noxious city streets. But the green lawns and big corner lots were isolating, the housework seemed to expand to fill the time available, and polio and smallpox were replaced by depression and alcoholism. All that was covered up in a kitchen conspiracy of denial ...
[i]nstead the problem was with the mystique of waxed floors and perfectly applied lipstick. — Betty Friedan

Are we truly obeying the command to love our neighbor as ourselves if we're storing up money for potential future needs when our neighbor is laboring today under actual present needs? — Randy Alcorn

I absolutely hate technology, and I'm computer illiterate, and I never use any labor-saving devices although I'm not convinced that a computer is a labor-saving device. — Chuck Close

If you look at payments to labor as a proportion of national income or gross domestic product, you find profits going way up, investment and savings going up. — Michael Hudson

We spend more time working for our labor-saving machines than they do working for us. — Edward Abbey

Nothing increases the number of jobs so rapidly as labor-saving machinery, because it releases wants theretofore unknown, by permitting leisure. — Isabel Paterson

The wren-box problem is becoming more acute each year, for wrens now demand better housing conditions and labor-saving devices. — Will Cuppy

We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable. — Wendell Berry

If a worker is deprived of hope to acquire some personal property, what other natural stimulus can be offered him that will inspire him to hard work, labor, saving and sobriety today, when so many nations and men have lost everything and all they have left is their capacity for work? — Pope Pius XII

Women say ... that if men had to have babies there would soon be no babies in the world ... I have sometimes wished that some clever man would actually have a baby in some new labor-saving way; then all men could take it up, and one of the oldest taunts in the world would be stilled forever. — Robertson Davies

Conspiracy theories are an irresistible labor-saving device in the face of complexity. — Henry Louis Gates

By the same token, frozen dinners, a microwave oven, a dishwasher, and an illegal immigrant hired to clean the house and take one's cat to the vet would have seemed like the epitome of materialism in another time, but now provide the only means available for two-career couples to work hard enough at their jobs to earn the salaries they need to pay for those labor-saving amenities. — Robert Wuthnow

The suburban housewife - she was the dream image of the young American women and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. The American housewife - freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth, and the illnesses of her grandmother had found true feminine fulfillment. — Betty Friedan

Most robotic vacuum cleaners don't see their environment, have little suction, and don't clean properly. They are gimmicks. We've been developing a unique 360 vision system that lets our robot see where it is, where it has been, and where it is yet to clean. Vision, combined with our high speed digital motor and cyclone technology, is the key to achieving a high performing robot vacuum - a genuine labor saving device. — James Dyson

Government machinery has been described as a marvelous labor saving device which enables ten men to do the work of one. — John Maynard Keynes

I think I should not go far wrong if I asserted that the amount of genuine leisure available in a society is generally in inverse proportion to the amount of labor-saving machinery it employs. — E.F. Schumacher

The great question that hovers over this issue, one that we have dealt with mainly by indifference, is the question of what people are for. Is their greatest dignity in unemployment? Is the obsolescence of human beings now our social goal? One would conclude so from our attitude toward work, especially the manual work necessary to the long-term preservation of the land, and from our rush toward mechanization, automation, and computerization. In a country that puts an absolute premium on labor-saving measures, short workdays, and retirement, why should there be any surprise at permanence of unemployment and welfare dependency? Those are only different names for our national ambition. — Wendell Berry

The most efficient labor-saving device is still money. — Franklin P. Jones

By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed. — Lewis Mumford

Voting is merely a labor-saving device for ascertaining on which side force lies and bowing to the inevitable ... It is neither more nor less than a paper representative of the bayonet, the bully, and the bullet. — Benjamin Tucker

Today's greatest labor-saving device is tomorrow. — Woodrow Wilson

I have a feeling-as compelling as a religious conviction-that if industry will constantly pass on to the worker and the customer all the savings of labor-saving machinery and invention, rather than siphon them off into the pools of watered securities, it will by that process keep distribution and production in balance and go as far toward Utopia as our poor human natures will go or be driven. — Samuel B. Pettengill

In the name of economy a thousand wasteful devices would be invented; and in the name of efficiency new forms of mechanical time-wasting would be devised: both processes gained speed through the nineteenth century and have come close to the limit of extravagant futility in our own time. But labor-saving devices could only achieve their end-that of freeing mankind for higher functions-if the standard of living remained stable. The dogma of increasing wants nullified every real economy and set the community in a collective squirrel-cage. — Lewis Mumford

The Electric Monk was a labor-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe. — Douglas Adams

God works to over throw the ungodly, and increasingly the world will come under the dominion of Christians, not by military aggression, but by godly labor, saving, in vestment, and orientation toward the future ... This is where history is going. The future belongs to the people of God, who obey His laws — David Chilton

Prejudice is one of the world's greatest labor-saving devices; it enables you to form an opinion without having to dig up the facts. — Laurence J. Peter

Labor saving devices have destroyed many jobs but have given rise to many new ones. It simply is up to us if we are going to resist or embrace the future. — Miles Anthony Smith

What is the point of "labor saving" if by making work effortless we make it poor, and if by doing poor work we weaken our bodies and lose conviviality and health? (Health is Membership, pg. 93) — Wendell Berry

Why has time disappeared in our culture? How is it that after decades of inventions and new technologies devoted to saving time and labor, the result is that there is no time left? We are a time-poor society; we are temporally impoverished. And there is no issue, no aspect of human life, that exceeds this in importance. The destruction of time is literally the destruction of life. — Jacob Needleman

Monorail tracks are prefabricated and can be erected relatively quickly: Simply dig a hole every 120 feet or so, plop down a column, and lift the track into place. Because the systems operate above traffic, collisions with errant motorists are never an issue. The trains are automated, saving millions in labor costs in the long run. — Brendan I. Koerner

Not many would fault the modern church for being unloving these days, but unloving is exactly what we are. For if we truly loved God, we would obey Him (John 14:21). If we truly loved the church, we would labor to keep it unstained and unmolested by this world (James 1:27). And if we truly loved the lost, we would introduce them to the God of the Bible who is able to save their souls, and not the pitiful god of our own making who is having a hard time saving anything at all (Psalm 50:21). — Eric Ludy

Labor has come out with a series of proposals to increase taxes, including taxes on people across Australia saving for their retirement, he has actually identified so far zero dollars in spending reductions. — Tony Abbott

The most popular labor saving device is still money. — Phyllis George

America today is a "save yourself" society if there ever was one. But does it really work? The underdeveloped societies suffer from one set of diseases: tuberculosis, malnutrition, pneumonia, parasites, typhoid, cholera, typhus, etc. Affluent America has virtually invented a whole new set of diseases: obesity, arteriosclerosis, heart disease, strokes, lung cancer, venereal disease, cirrhosis of the liver, drug addiction, alcoholism, divorce, battered children, suicide, murder. Take your choice. Labor-saving machines have turned out to be body-killing devices. Our affluence has allowed both mobility and isolation of the nuclear family, and as a result, our divorce courts, our prisons and our mental institutions are flooded. In saving ourselves we have nearly lost ourselves. — John Piper

Adam invented love at first sight, one of the greatest labor-saving machines the world ever saw. — Josh Billings

The investment we're all looking for is actually saving labor ... Look at what the internet is doing to retail. — James Chanos

Man is naturally lazy, therefore he invents labor-saving devices. — Ignacy Jan Paderewski

We have reached a point today where labor-saving devices are good only when they do not throw the worker out of his job. — Eleanor Roosevelt

Prosperity is the fruit of labor. It begins with saving money. — Abraham Lincoln