Quotes & Sayings About Low Pay

There's going to be all different price points, and you get what you pay for. There's certainly low things made of cardboard that you don't put on your head, you just hold up little viewers that give you this glimmer of what VR could be. — Brendan Iribe

I just like to do work that inspires me, and I don't pay any attention to whether it's a high- or low-budget movie. — Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Mercury is most commonly recognized as a developmental toxin, threatening to young children and fetuses as they develop their nervous system. Prenatal exposure to even low levels of mercury can cause life-long problems with language skills, fine motor function, and the ability to pay attention. — Frances Beinecke

Yes, and then it's these things that cause the whites to say we're not worthy of first-class citizenship." "Ah ... " He dropped his hands to his sides hard in frustration. "Isn't it so? They make it impossible for us to earn, to pay much in taxes because we haven't much in income, and then they say that because they pay most of the taxes, they have the right to have things like they want. It's a vicious circle, Mr. Griffin, and I don't know how we'll get out of it. They put us low, and then blame us for being down there and say that since we are low, we can't deserve our rights. — John Howard Griffin

Chivalry:
It's treating a woman politely
As long as she isn't a fright:
It's guarding the girls who act rightly,
If you can be judge of what's right;
It's being - not just, but so pleasant;
It's tipping while wages are low;
It's making a beautiful present,
And failing to pay what you owe. — Alice Duer Miller

We live in a very low state of the world, and pay unwilling tribute to government founded on force. There is not, among the most religious and instructed men of the most religious and civil nations, a reliance on the moral sentiment, and a sufficient belief in the unity of things to persuade them that society can be maintained without artificial restraints, as well as the solar system; or that the private citizen might be reasonable, and a good neighbor, without the hint of a jail or a confiscation. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I know very well that if you get men who are really, really swells, for that is what it is, Mr. Low, and pay them well enough, and so make it really an important thing, they can browbeat any judge and hoodwink any jury. — Anthony Trollope

Never rate yourself too low; you will be whoever you think you can be provided you are willing to pay the price! — Israelmore Ayivor

If your appraisal comes back too low - you don't have at least 10% equity for a conforming loan or 20% for a jumbo loan - you might not be able to refinance at all, at least with a loan that's packaged and sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. That means you may have to pay a much higher rate. — Jean Chatzky

If you've got unemployment, low pay, that was just too bad. But that was the system. That was the sort of economy and philosophy against which I was fighting in the 1930s. — Barbara Castle

When you live from freelance check to freelance check, your mind is always on "What's the next piece I'm going to write, or draw, that'll pay this month's rent?" And so going out to play ball with my kids was a low priority. — Al Jaffee

If you consider how much you should pay for a house, you will be influenced by the asking price. The same house will appear more valuable if its listing price is high than if it is low, even if you are determined to resist the influence of this number; — Daniel Kahneman

Fiat-money! Let the State 'create' money, and make the poor rich, and free them from the bonds of the capitalists! How foolish to forego the opportunity of making everybody rich, and consequently happy, that the State's right to create money gives it! How wrong to forego it simply because this would run counter to the interests of the rich! How wicked of the economists to assert that it is not within the power of the State to create wealth by means of the printing press!- You statesmen want to build railways, and complain of the low state of the exchequer? Well, then, do not beg loans from the capitalists and anxiously calculate whether your railways will bring in enough to enable you to pay interest and amortization on your debt. Create money, and help yourselves. — Ludwig Von Mises

The minimum wage law very cleverly is misnamed. The real minimum wage is zero. That is what many inexperienced and low skilled people receive as a result of legislation that makes it illegal to pay them what they are currently worth to an employer. — Thomas Sowell

But this is not a world of free freights. One pays according to an iron schedule
for every strength the balanced weakness; for every high a corresponding low; for every fictitious god-like moment an equivalent time in reptilian slime. For every feat of telescoping long days and weeks of life into mad magnificent instants, one must pay with shortened life, and, oft-times,
with savage usury added. — Jack London

Whether you are a low-income elderly woman living at the end of a dirt road in Vermont or a wealthy CEO living on Park Avenue, you get your mail six days a week. And you pay for this service at a cost far less than anywhere else in the industrialized world. — Bernie Sanders

Unfortunately, what anti-human trafficking NGOs [non-governmental organizations] really do is instead quite damaging: they normalize existent labor opportunities for women, no matter how low the pay, dangerous the conditions, or abusive an environment they foster. And they shame women who reject such jobs. — Anne Elizabeth Moore

Low pay generally means harder work under worse conditions. — Paul Goodman

The way we make money as a group is that we don't pay a lot for anything, and most of the stocks we buy have low expectations. — Joel Greenblatt

But by the end of two years, most have either changed careers or moved to suburban schools - a consequence of low pay, a lack of support from the educational bureaucracy, and a pervasive feeling of isolation. — Barack Obama

This thing we call luck is merely professionalism and attention to detail, it's your awareness of everything that is going on around you, it's how well you know and understand your aircraft and your own limitations. Luck is the sum total of your of abilities as an aviator. If you think your luck is running low, you'd better get busy & make some more. Work harder, pay more attention. Do better preflights. — Stephen Coonts

The median family of four ... paid $4,722 in federal taxes last year. That's enough to pay for a new curtain for the secretary of commerce's office, to bribe a farmer not to plant 38 acres with corn ... seven weeks of salary for a Customs man assigned to save us from the terror of high-quality, low priced foreign TV sets, or the subsidy on 6,000 bushels of wheat to prop up the Soviet regime. Surely civilization would collapse without such essential services. — Alan Bock

And that's the one thing that people do not understand is that we have very low interest rates and if those go back to historical levels or even go back to scary thoughts that they're back in the late '70s, early '80s, then that's going to really be hard to actually pay off those debts. It's going to be a - it's going to be a very big problem. — Ben Quayle

In Hamilton's The Universe Wreckers ... it was in that novel that, for the first time, I learned Neptune had a satellite named Triton ... It was from The Drums of Tapajos that I first learned there was a Mato Grosso area in the Amazon basin. It was from The Black Star Passes and other stories by John W. Campbell that I first heard of relativity.
The pleasure of reading about such things in the dramatic and fascinating form of science fiction gave me a push toward science that was irresistible. It was science fiction that made me want to be a scientist strongly enough to eventually make me one.
That is not to say that science fiction stories can be completely trusted as a source of specific knowledge ... However, the misguidings of science fiction can be unlearned. Sometimes the unlearning process is not easy, but it is a low price to pay for the gift of fascination over science. — Isaac Asimov

Corporations barely pay taxes. The corporate tax rate is already very low, but corporations have worked out an array of complicated techniques so they often don't have to pay taxes at all ... The scale of sheer robbery by corporate power is enormous. — Noam Chomsky

The thing that drives me crazy is when comics say 'I have low self-esteem.' No you don't. You're standing on stage asking people to pay. You don't play an instrument. You want people to pay to hear what's in your mind. You don't have low self-esteem. You might have other problems. — Colin Quinn

Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands. — Learned Hand

Whenever I was confronted in the schoolyard, I found some way to avoid the fight. I ran for it. I backed down. Psychologically and emotionally, that isn't a low-cost course of action for most boys. You avoid a physical beating, but you pay a real social and psychological cost for it. Those moments of walking away from fights, even though I knew it was the rational and civilized thing to do, cost me tremendously. — Jonathan Gottschall

Atticus was speaking so quietly his last word crashed on our ears. I looked up, and his face was vehement. "There's nothing more sickening to me than a low-grade white man who'll take advantage of a Negro's ignorance. Don't fool yourselves - it's all adding up and one of these days we're going to pay the bill for it. I hope it's not in you children's time." Jem — Harper Lee

When the occasional customer tells us his or her dream of running a bookstore someday, we recognize our own naivete in that enthusiasm. They may have some inkling about long hours and low pay, but rarely do they know about the fires, the guerrilla bargainers, the bereavements, or the prisons. Neither did we - then. But we sure do now. In all honesty, the scariest, hardest, saddest, and most important stories found in a bookshop aren't in the books, they're in the customers. — Wendy Welch

When someone works for less pay than she can live on - when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently - then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Henry David Thoreau, Susan B. Anthony, W. E. B. DuBois, and Lyndon B. Johnson are just a few of the famous Americans who taught. They resisted the fantasy of educators as saints or saviors, and understood teaching as a job in which the potential for children's intellectual transcendence and social mobility, though always present, is limited by real-world concerns such as poor training, low pay, inadequate supplies, inept administration, and impoverished students and families. These teachers' stories, and those of less well-known teachers, propel this history forward and help us understand why American teaching has evolved into such a peculiar profession, one attacked and admired in equal proportion. — Dana Goldstein

Peace without Justice is a low estate,- A coward cringing to an iron Fate! But Peace through Justice is the great ideal,- We'll pay the price of war to make it real. — Henry Van Dyke

Nothing so evil as money ever grew to be current among men. This lays cities low, this drives men from their homes, this trains and warps honest souls till they set themselves to works of shame; this still teaches folk to practise villainies, and to know every godless deed. But all the men who wrought this thing for hire have made it sure that, soon or late, they shall pay the price. — Sophocles

I've gotten to the point where I'm not even a little apologetic about this business of not eating stuff that's bad for me. No one else has to live with my fat, work through my energy and mood swings, pay my doctor bills, fight my cravings, for face my family history of diabetes and cancer. If people insist, I can get a little testy. — Dana Carpender

I had no money, no food, no prospects, no contacts. Eating was my first priority, and for that, one usually needs money, and so lo and behold I had a goal in sight. I collected cans and bottles, scrounged parking lots and sidewalks, my head held low and eyes intent on the ground instead of where I was going. Vending machines and pay phones sometimes gave up their treasures in the form of change people had forgotten to collect. They're not what I'd call jackpots, but finding a dollar here and a dollar there is a lot when you have nothing. — R. Canepa

Henry Ford gave that idea popular currency when he brought out the famous Model T car and announced in 1914 that he would pay his workers the then unheard-of wage of $ 5 a day. Not only was it a matter of social justice, Ford later wrote, but it was smart business. When wages are low, Ford argued, business and the economy are at risk. But when pay is high and steady, Ford reasoned, business is more secure because workers earn enough to be good customers and eventually to be able to afford to buy Model Ts. — Hedrick Smith

Pay close attention. Listen carefully. Let's look at what happens when fear is in charge.

With fear in charge, you can never fully relax, let your guard down, be your true self. You can't open up because you are afraid of how people will respond if they were to meet the real you. When fear is in charge, you simply cannot take that chance. Fear will not allow honesty, fear despises spontaneity, and fear refuses to believe in you. Fear may mean well, but it ruins everything by overprotecting you, insisting that you stay hidden and keep a low profile, that your time is coming....sometime later.

Fear is bold, but insists that you be timid. Take a chance and there will be hell to pay: fear will call on its dear friend, shame, to meet you on the other side of your risk taking, to tell you what you should not have done. Fear will trip you, tackle you, smother you, do whatever it takes to cause you to hesitate, to stop you. In this way fear is fearless. — Thom Rutledge

When Obama boasts that it will be a huge boon to the economy to give amnesty to millions of low-wage workers, who won't pay income taxes but will need a lot of government services, remember: Obamacare was supposed to save money, too. — Ann Coulter

It's not reasonable for companies that have chief executives and board members who are paid very considerable sums to subsidise low pay through in-work benefits. — Boris Johnson

He got up. It was too early to go to bed; at least, he was not in the mood for it. He pined for a bit of amusement - something cheap and easy. A seat in the pictures, cigarettes, beer. Useless! No money to pay for any of them. He would read KING LEAR and forget this filthy century. Finally, however, it was THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES that he took from the mantelpiece. SHERLOCK HOLMES was his favorite of all books, because he knew it by heart. The oil in the lamp was giving out and it was getting beastly cold. Gordon dragged the quilt from his bed, wrapped it round his legs and sat down to read. His right elbow on the table, his hands under his coat to keep them warm, he read through "The Adventure of the Speckled Band." The little gas-mantle sighed above, the circular flame of the oil-lamp burned low, a thin bracket of fire, giving out no more heat than a candle. — George Orwell

The legacy of women's war work is our present post-industrial employment structure. It was the war that created the demand for a technologically advanced, de-skilled, low-paid, non-unionized female workforce and paved the way for making part-time work the norm for married women now. A generation later, it was the daughters of wartime women workers who completed their mothers' campaign for equal pay. — Linda Grant

Cunning pays no regard to virtue, and is but the low mimic of reason. — Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

I don't think the folks in the low-tax states really want to go into a fairness discussion. Residents of Connecticut and New York would love to remind them how much they pay in federal taxes to support programs for Mississippi and South Dakota. — Gail Collins

Any one may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which will best pay the Treasury; there is not even a patriotic duty to increase ones taxes. — Learned Hand

Low lights signal to our senses that the workday may be over and it's time for sleep, making it hard for an audience to pay careful attention. When we stand behind a big wooden podium, it can feel as if there's a shield between us and the audience. — John P. Kotter

At HubSpot, VORP means evaluating the difference between what you are paid and the least amount the company could pay someone else to do your job. It's a vicious metric, with only one goal, which is to drive the price of labor as low as possible. — Dan Lyons

Low-wage workers are also consumers. It's just common sense: when these workers have more take-home pay it leads to spending that trickles up to benefit many small, locally owned businesses. — Mark Price

The most absurd public opinion polls are those on taxes. Now, if there is one thing we know about taxes, it is that people do not want to pay them. If they wanted to pay them, there would be no need for taxes. People would gladly figure out how much of their money the government deserves and send it in. And yet we routinely hear about opinion polls that reveal that the public likes the tax level as it is and might even like it higher. Next they will tell us that the public thinks the crime rate is too low, or that the American people would really like to be in more auto accidents. — Llewellyn Rockwell

There's nothing more sickening to me than a low-grade white man who'll take advantage of a Negro's ignorance. Don't fool yourselves - it's all adding up and one of these days we're going to pay the bill for it. I hope it's not in you children's time. — Harper Lee

In our experience at Safeway, we're confident that we can actually improve the quality of health care while taking costs down and using the savings to help finance coverage of low-income people who are clearly going to need help to pay for insurance. — Steven Burd

I think I'm basically a liberal Conservative - I believe in low tax, spirit of free enterprise, and in making sure that we as politicians create the framework for business to produce the dosh that we're going to need to pay for the poorest. And the longer I live, the more I think that we all have a duty to each other. — Boris Johnson

I now say that the world has the technology - either available or well advanced in the research pipeline - to feed on a sustainable basis a population of 10 billion people. The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology? While the affluent nations can certainly afford to adopt ultra low-risk positions, and pay more for food produced by the so-called "organic" methods, the one billion chronically undernourished people of the low income, food-deficit nations cannot. — Norman Borlaug

Start-ups like UniversityNow, a network of low-cost, online colleges, allows students to work at their own pace and pay a few hundred dollars a month for a degree. — Dan Rather

But if I tell them about dozens and dozens of studies showing that the countries with low rates of heart disease consume low amounts of animal-based foods, and dozens and dozens of studies showing that individuals who eat more whole, plant-based foods get less heart disease, and I go on to document still more studies showing that a diet low in animal-based foods and high in unprocessed plant-based foods can slow or reverse heart disease, then people are more inclined to pay some attention. — T. Colin Campbell

It's like playing the lottery. It doesn't matter how extremely low the chances are of winning. You gotta be in it to win it. Hitting on every girl in sight is like buying a whole lot of lottery tickets. You never know, one day one of them might actually pay off. — Oliver Markus

A number of the heads of the offices were slippery politicians of a low moral grade, themselves appointed under the spoils system, and anxious, directly or indirectly, to break down the merit system and to pay their own political debts by appointing their henchmen and supporters to the positions under them. Occasionally these men acted with open and naked brutality. Ordinarily they sought by cunning to evade the law. — Theodore Roosevelt

It's just economics 101: When it's free to pollute, you get more pollution. But when there's a price to pay, industry will have an incentive to find low-cost carbon solutions. — Fred Krupp

If you want to work your stinking job and pay into a pension plan for the rest of your days then fine; if you want to visit the supermarket once a week and feel great about yourself for finding the best offers on low fat microwave meals then fine; if you want to click around them computers all night, chatting to your Aunt Sally in Honolulu then fine; if you want to drink in moderation so you don't end up shitting the bed then fine; if you want to continue the cycle of obedient drones then fine; if you want to resent how average your life has turned out in return for a salary that buys you nothing more than permanent misery then fine. All fine and dandy. Go right ahead. Just leave me the fuck out of it. — Rupert Dreyfus

Clean energy is about offering people the opportunity to do what's right for themselves and the people they love. It's about reducing the pollution that makes people sick. It's about helping the low-income families struggling to pay their gas and electricity bills. — Gloria Reuben

The same economic relationship is at work underground, where low-density land-use patterns require greater lengths of pipe and conduit to distribute municipal services. This high ratio of public to private expenditure helps explain why suburban municipalities are finding that new growth fails to pay for itself at acceptable levels of taxation. — Andres Duany

They were family. They had a deal, him and Ian. They'd had it since they were kids growing up in the same low-rent trailer park with exactly two ways out - prison or the US military. Ian had stayed in the Army and Alex had gotten out the minute they would pay for his college. The friendship had survived years and distance. — Lexi Blake

A number of people who I've talked to about this assume that I got into a fight with the cops. (Because of, y'know, the militant politics.) I actually had an audience member come up to me once and ask me if I paid taxes. Of course I pay taxes! I pay taxes for exactly the same reason that I hate paying taxes - because I think my government is terrifying and stupid. I don't need the IRS kicking my door down and taking my meticulously alphabetized collection of Tijuana bibles. — Phillip Andrew Bennett Low

I pay low wages. I can take advantage of that. We're going to be successful, but the basis is a very low-wage, low-benefit model of employment. — Sam Walton

Remember that in most cases, student loan debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy. So you continue to pay it off anyway. Those who have very low interest rates (2-2.5 percent) on student loans and know everything is secure, great. — Suze Orman

Pilfering was common in Communist China's state-owned enterprises, as the Party secretaries were slack in guarding properties that belonged to the government and poorly paid workers felt it fair compensation for their low pay. The practice was so widespread that it was an open secret. The workers joked about it and called it "Communism," which in Chinese translation means "sharing property." Pg. 390 — Nien Cheng

I didn't answer. Mr. Dowater had a reputation for deadpan humor, a humor that was strangely similar to the low-level, sarcastic sniper fire offered by the school's underbleacher population of stoners and class-cutters. It didn't really pay to engage it. After — Ethan Canin

With just about every script, in almost every corner of the set, I was faced with the truth: This was my parents' life. My mother had sat in handcuffs; my father had once worn an orange jumpsuit like the dozens that sat folded in our wardrobe department. For the other actors and me on our show, this was all fantasy, the re-creation of a world we knew little about; for Mami and Papi, it could not have been any more real or painful...I've had so many scenes in which Flaca & I are doing the dirty work, like cleaning the kitchen or mopping the floors, which is when I think of my parents most. Long before they ended up in prison, they'd spent years handling the nastiest jobs, the ones often avoided by others. Manual labor. Low pay. No respect. They must've felt so trapped. It must've been so hard for them to maintain their dignity when others looked down on them or, worse, didn't see them at all. — Diane Guerrero

Hours are long. Wages are pitiful. But sweatshops are the symptom, not the cause, of shocking global poverty. Workers go there voluntarily, which means - hard as it is to believe - that whatever their alternatives are, they are worse. They stay there, too; turnover rates of multinational-owned factories are low, because conditions and pay, while bad, are better than those in factories run by local firms. And even a local company is likely to pay better than trying to earn money without a job: running an illegal street stall, working as a prostitute, or combing reeking landfills in cities like Manila to find recyclable goods. — Tim Harford

Obviously, people with low or even moderate incomes could not afford such savings rates, and even diligent savings from their low wages would not be enough to pay for either retirement or healthcare. — William Greider

MCJOB: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice for people who have never held one. — Douglas Coupland

Moreover, statistics can be deceiving: the growth of jobs in the US in the 90s was due to many part-time jobs, with no benefits and generally low pay. — David Korten

In the four decades after World War II, manufacturing jobs paid more than other jobs for given skills. But that is much less true today. Increased international competition has forced American manufacturers to reduce costs. As a result, the pay premium for low-skilled workers in manufacturing is smaller than it once was. — Christina Romer

It makes no difference how low tuition is if the student has no source of funds to pay that tuition. — James E. Rogers

In our high-tech, high-skilled economy where low-skilled work is being scaled back, phased out, exported, or severely under-compensated, all the right behavior in the world won't create better jobs with more pay. — Michael Eric Dyson

Government schools can go for decades delivering low-quality services, and what's the result? The people who manage it earn higher pay. It's nearly impossible to fire the incompetents. And, taxpayers, who support the service, are given higher tax bills. — Walter E. Williams

Low wages fail even from a purely business point of view wherever it is a question of producing goods which require any sort of skilled labour, or the use of expensive machinery which is easily damaged, or in general wherever any great amount of sharp attention or of initiative is required. Here low wages do not pay, and their effect is the opposite of what was intended. For not only is a developed sense of responsibility absolutely indispensable, but in general also an attitude which, at least during working hours, is freed from continual calculations of how the customary wage may be earned with a maximum of comfort and a minimum of exertion. Labour must, on the contrary, be performed as if it were an absolute end in itself, a calling. But such an attitude is by no means a product of nature. It cannot be evoked by low wages or high ones alone, but can only be the product of a long and arduous process of education. — Max Weber

Maybe you'll take the cash out. So a credit card company or a bank that goes into the business of saying we're going to be the broker, we're going to sell you a mortgage that you're going to be able to pay off, we're going to help you reduce your credit card debt, we're going to help you save for retirement, we're going to put you into mutual funds that have low fees rather than high fees. — Richard Thaler

I know firsthand that many employers who comply with other labor standards still hire the undocumented. Many businesses pay the minimum wage and have barely tolerable working conditions because there are sufficient undocumented workers willing to accept those terms. If we care about low-income workers in this country, we need to create pressure to improve their economic condition by reducing the supply of unauthorized workers. — Maria Echaveste