Wage Quotes & Sayings

The American people want to raise the minimum wage. Every poll tells us that. That bill will not get to the floor of the Senate. The American people want to ask the rich to pay more in taxes. But the legislation that will get to the floor is tax breaks for billionaires. — Bernie Sanders

The main difference lies in wage levels, which is because our workers are not yet as well trained as in other countries. We are a poor country. This is why we must accept the conditions that prevail in international markets. But our trade unions do represent the rights of workers. — Nguyen Minh Triet

In the Muslim world, there are many people who have been vocal and we have been very vocal against extremists. But how to win this battle is an ongoing battle. And we must continue to wage the battle for peace. — Feisal Abdul Rauf

I believe we will see a biofuels resurgence. While gas prices skyrocket and we continue to wage wars for oil, while spills, fracking, tar sands and the oil madness of our empire continue, people are waking up and realizing that you can't be against petroleum and against fuels that come from nature. — Josh Tickell

Young people, some of whom are not born into the faith, are being fired up by preachers using basic Islamic scripture and mobilized to wage jihad by radical imams who represent themselves as legitimate Muslim clergymen. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

A writing in the sand which all may read but few understand. - Philip Jose Farmer in 'Riders of the Purple Wage — Philip Jose Farmer

It is amazing to a great many of us how Congress ignores the Constitution. For example, the 13th Amendment clearly states: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction." Currently, the average working person pays over forty percent of his earnings to the Government (City, State and National) and IT IS NOT VOLUNTARY! Did the people vote for these taxes? NO! They were imposed by a Communist dominated Congress. Therefore, Congress has declared that each and every wage earner is a SLAVE of the Government and the Government has a right to steal their money. WHY? — Robert Gates Sr.

Women often come up not knowing how to make decisions. We get wishy-washy. We become great wage earners - breadwinners - but we don't know how to control empires. — Jackee Harry

Terror is a tactic. We can not wage "war" against a tactic. — Ron Paul

In the ideology of the new Silicon Valley, work was for the owned. Play was for the owners. There was a fundamental capitalism at work: While they abhorred the idea of being a wage slave, the young men of Silicon Valley were not trying to tear down the capitalist system. They were trying to become its new masters. — Katherine Losse

[A]s we celebrate 75 years of the minimum wage, we must also recognize that it is no longer achieving its potential impact in our economy or for America's working families. Every American deserves the chance to build a better life for his or her family - and raising the minimum wage will provide that opportunity. — Tom Harkin

If only Mexico paid their workers a decent wage. — Luis Alberto Urrea

We live in a highly industrialized society and every member of the Black nation must be as academically and technologically developed as possible. To wage a revolution, we need competent teachers, doctors, nurses, electronics experts, chemists, biologists, physicists, political scientists, and so on and so forth. Black women sitting at home reading bedtime stories to their children are just not going to make it. — Frances M. Beal

I mun hev' my wage, and I mun goa! I hed aimed to dee wheare I'd sarved fur sixty year; — Emily Bronte

Money could not be converted into capital if wage labour did not exist. — David Harvey

We have to get very militant with some of these employers to say there's no shortcuts, our people have a right to a fair day's wage for a fair day's pay, and we've got to get that done. And that's going to happen. — James P. Hoffa

It's great that Maryland is tied for having the lowest wage gap between our working men and women of any state in the nation, but there's more work to do to eliminate that gap entirely. — Martin O'Malley

Al-Qa'idah was set up to wage a jihad against infidelity, particularly to encounter the onslaught of the infidel countries against the Islamic states. Jihad is the sixth undeclared element of Islam. The first five being the basic holy words of Islam, prayers, fast, pilgrimage to Mecca, and giving alms Every anti-Islamic person is afraid of it. Al-Qa'idah wants to keep this element alive and active and make it part of the daily life of the Muslims. It wants to give it the status of worship. We are not against any Islamic country nor we consider a war against an Islamic country as jihad. — Osama Bin Laden

We know of no more crucial civil rights issue facing Congress today than the need to increase the federal minimum wage and extend its coverage. — Martin Luther King Jr.

There are very few people at the decision-making table to argue for minimum-wage workers. Very few people. — Elizabeth Warren

Inflationary trends are under way. Wage increases, through strikes or threatened strikes, are rampant. Government expenditures are ballooning ominously. Hoarding has contributed unconscionably to price-boosting. The Government should institute measures calculated to arrest inflation. America's commitments are already so mountainous, international and domestic, that the pruning knife should be applied. You and I, all American taxpayers, don't possess limitless resources-our pockets are not bottomless. Curb inflation at every turn! — B.C. Forbes

I believe that people of my income group should pay more, and I explained why, but that won't necessarily lift overall wage levels. — William J. Clinton

I first would allow the guilty bankers to pay, you know, the ability to pay back anything over $100 million [of] personal wealth because I believe in a maximum wage of $100 million. And if they are unable to live on that amount of that amount then they should, you know, go to the reeducation camps and if that doesn't help, then being beheaded. — Roseanne Barr

A fair day's wage for a fair day's work: it is as just a demand as governed men ever made of governing. It is the everlasting right of man. — Thomas Carlyle

Slowly, God is opening my eyes to needs all around me. In Scripture, God revisits this issue of caring for the poor- an echo that repeats itself from Genesis to Revelation. The Bible acknowledges that the poor will always be part of society, but God takes on their cause. The Mosaic law of the Old Testament is filled with regulations to prevent and eliminate poverty. The poor were given the right to glean- to take produce from the unharvested edges of the fields, a portion of the tithes, and a daily wage. The law prevented permanent slavery by releasing Jewish bondsmen and women on the sabbatical and Jubilee year and forbade charging interest on loans. In one of his most tender acts, God made sure that the poor- the aliens, widows, and orphans- were all invited to the feasts. — Margaret Feinberg

The song 'Take This Job and Shove It' spent 18 weeks on the country charts in 1977. 1970s country music fans had a clearer understanding of the ennui of wage-slavery than modern elites. — Alex Pareene

Fraud in the insurance industry is calculated to be $100 billion to $300 billion a year, a cost that gets passed directly to consumers in the form of higher premiums. All told, combined public- and private-sector fraud costs every household in the United States probably around $5,000 a year - or roughly the equivalent of working four months at a minimum-wage job. A hunter-gatherer community that lost four months' worth of food would face a serious threat to its survival, and its retribution against the people who caused that hardship would be immediate and probably very violent. Westerners — Sebastian Junger

The GREATEST battle you wage against FAILURE occurs on the INSIDE, not the OUTSIDE. — John C. Maxwell

It was not always the case, of course, that navies paid for themselves. In wartime, costs often exceeded revenues, and those deficits grew over time as fleets and armies got bigger. But this was hardly an insurmountable obstacle for the most dynamic economies in the world. The United Provinces and England were able to borrow all they needed to underwrite their defense budgets. The pressures of war gave a powerful impetus to the growth of stocks, bonds, loans, and paper currencies during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and helped to turn Amsterdam and then London into international financial centers. To take one example, the Bank of England was established in 1694 to raise funds to allow England to wage war against France. — Max Boot

Since the war I have stressed altogether five main objectives. The true union of Europe; the union of government with science; the power of government to act rapidly and decisively, subject to parliamentary control; the effective leadership of government to solve the economic problem by use of the wage-price mechanism at the two key-points of the modern industrial world; and a clearly defined purpose for a movement of humanity to ever higher forms. — Oswald Mosley

What struck me as I began to study history was how nationalist fervor
inculcated from childhood on by pledges of allegiance, national anthems, flags waving and rhetoric blowing
permeated the educational systems of all countries, including our own. I wonder now how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own. Then we could never drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or napalm on Vietnam, or wage war anywhere, because wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children, indeed our children. — Howard Zinn

She spent the next hour dividing her time between the phone and the computer; scaring the ever-loving shit out of herself while waiting on hold by investiGoogling type 2 diabetes on her laptop. She found one nut who claimed diabetes was a governmental plot to extract billions of dollars from the unsuspecting public in order to wage the war for oil. — Karin Slaughter

I do feel like food should cost more, because we aren't paying farmers a living wage. It has to cost more. — Alice Waters

At the end of World War II, we had wage and price controls. Under wartime inflationary conditions, many employers found it difficult to recruit employees. To get around the limitations of wage control, many began to offer health care as a fringe benefit to attract workers. As a new benefit, it took some years for the Internal Revenue Service to get around to requiring the cost of the medical care to be included in the reported taxable income of the employees. By the time it did, workers had come to regard nontaxable medical care provided by the employer as a right - or should I say entitlement? They raised such a big political fuss that Congress legislated nontaxable status for employer-provided medical care. — Milton Friedman

But what makes wage slaves? Wages! — Groucho Marx

It's tough to figure out how do we compete in Europe and North America, when obviously a living wage for us is very different than a living wage in Indonesia. — John Malkovich

It's your decision to work for less than minimum wage — D. Jackson

We wish to control big business so as to secure among other things good wages for the wage-workers and reasonable prices for the consumers. Wherever in any business the prosperity of the business man is obtained by lowering the wages of his workmen and charging an excessive price to the consumers we wish to interfere and stop such practices. We will not submit to that kind of prosperity any more than we will submit to prosperity obtained by swindling investors or getting unfair advantages over business rivals. — Theodore Roosevelt

I believe in raising the minimum wage and equal pay for work. — Hillary Clinton

The official keepers of the Holocaust wage an international campaign to silence the disturbing questions. Most people never even hear the revisionist position because Jewish forces dominate the media and block mainstream access to material that questions Holocaust orthodoxy. — David Duke

Few places in American culture have made as effective a case for entrepreneurship than hip-hop. Hip-hop tells young people that our society is offering very limited options for youth. And that while society points to a radical decline in living wage jobs for youth and meaningful and affordable education, hip-hop is offering an alternative legitimate economy that is giving youth hope. — Bakari Kitwana

Communism worked honestly by officials devoid of human frailties and devoted to nothing but the good of its slaves, would have certain manifest material advantages as compared with a proletarian wage-system where millions live in semi-starvation, and many millions more in permanent dread thereof. But even if it were administered thus Communism would only produce its benefits through imposing slavery. — Hilaire Belloc

When I started in the business, the minimum wage was $1.25. I've seen an enormous number of wage increases. Basically, it applies evenly to everyone in the business. — Fred DeLuca

Goldin and Katz have no doubt that increased wage inequality in the United States is due to a failure to invest sufficiently in higher education. More precisely, too many people failed to receive the necessary training, in part because families could not afford the high cost of tuition. In order to reverse this trend, they conclude, the United States should invest heavily in education so that as many people as possible can attend college. — Thomas Piketty

I think 'Elbow' were considered successful even before [2008's] Seldom Seen Kid because we were living off the band. We have a great manager who keeps our coffers topped off, and we give ourselves a sensible wage with a view to having three fallow years between records. We always make sure we have enough money to make a record and not be pressured time-wise. — Guy Garvey

Minimum wage laws tragically generate unemployment, especially among the poorest and least skilled or educated workers ... Because a minimum wage, of course, does not guarantee any worker's employment; it only prohibits, by force of law, anyone from being hired at the wage which would pay his employer to hire him. — Murray Rothbard

Sharp increases in the minimum wage rate are also inflationary. Frequently workers paid more than the minimum gauge their wages relative to it. This is especially true of those workers who are paid by the hour. An increase in the minimum therefore increases their demands for higher wages in order to maintain their place in the structure of wages. And when the increase is as sharp as it is in H.R. 7935, the result is sure to be a fresh surge of inflation. Once again, prudence dictates a more gradual increase in the wage rate, so that the economy can more easily absorb the impact. — Richard M. Nixon

I thought I was answering a question that I had heard that was about increasing the minimum wage - would I consider that. So let me just go on record and say this: I am not for decreasing the minimum wage. I did not say that and that is not something I would consider. — Linda McMahon

If I were a factory employee, a workman on the railroads or a wage-earner of any sort, I would undoubtedly join the union of my trade. If I disapproved of its policy, I would join in order to fight that policy; if the union leaders were dishonest, I would join in order to put them out. I believe in the union and I believe that all men who are benefited by the union are morally bound to help to the extent of their power in the common interests advanced by the union. — Theodore Roosevelt

What workers must learn is that the only reason why wage rates are higher in the United States is that the per head quota of capital invested is higher. — Ludwig Von Mises

Raising the minimum wage a lot across the board would make a big difference. It's not the only thing, but it's an indispensable part of solving the problem. — Nick Hanauer

As Louis Uchitelle has reported in the New York Times, many employers will offer almost anything - free meals, subsidized transportation, store discounts - rather than raise wages. The reason for this, in the words of one employer, is that such extras "can be shed more easily" than wage increases when changes in the market seem to make them unnecessary.7 In the same spirit, automobile manufacturers would rather offer their customers cash rebates than reduced prices; the advantage of the rebate is that it seems like a gift and can be withdrawn without explanation. — Barbara Ehrenreich

I often think it would be really interesting to take all of those who would wage war to the battlefield cemeteries, and say, explain yourself to the dead. Explain yourself to the dead! — Jacqueline Winspear

We took the position we wanted our people to be better than minimum wage, so we're going to pay better than minimum wage, and we still do that. — Kenneth Langone

Some sins do bear their privilege on earth,
And so doth yours: your fault was not your folly;
Needs must you lay your heart at his dispose,
Subjected tribute to commanding love,
Against whose fury and unmatched force
The aweless lion could not wage the fight
Nor keep his princely heart from Richard's hand. — William Shakespeare

To renounce the conquest of power is voluntarily to leave the power with those who wield it, the exploiters. The essence of every revolution consisted and consists in putting a new class in power, thus enabling it to realize its own program in life. It is impossible to wage war and to reject victory. — Leon Trotsky

There would be plenty of justification to raise revenues in order to subsidize businesses that employ low-wage workers. But there can be no justification for pandering to the economy's entire bottom half merely to attract its votes. — Edmund Phelps

Can't get around the old minimum wage, Mortimer. — Dan Aykroyd

Deep caring about each other's fate does seem to be on the decline, but I do not believe that New Age narcissism is much to blame. The external causes of our moral indifference are a fragmented mass society that leaves us isolated and afraid, an economic system that puts the rights of capital before the rights of people, and a political process that makes citizens into ciphers.

These are the forces that allow, even encourage, unbridled competition, social irresponsibility, and the survival of the financially fittest. The executives who brought down the major corporations by taking indecent sums off the top while wage earners of modest means lost their retirement accounts were clearly more influenced by capitalist amorality than by some New Age guru. — Parker J. Palmer

Only vain people wage war against the vanity of others. — Marguerite Gardiner, Countess Of Blessington

The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

But I also want to give them a pathway so that they can earn citizenship, earn a legal status, start learning English, pay a significant fine, go to the back of the line, but they can then stay here and they can have the ability to enforce a minimum wage that they're paid, make sure the worker safety laws are available, make sure that they can join a union. — Barack Obama

Use justice to rule a country. Use surprise to wage war. Use non-action to govern the world. — Laozi

And women, it turns out, pay a steep economic price for being mothers: according to Shelley Correll, a Stanford sociologist who looks at gender inequities in the labor force, the wage gap between mothers and childless women who are otherwise equally qualified is now greater than the wage gap between women and men generally. — Jennifer Senior

To address this, we must wage a war on the militants. First, we must make it an offence, punishable by many years in jail, to ride a bicycle in anything other than what I like to call home clothes. Cycling shops selling gel for your bottom crack and outfits with padded gussets will be raided by the police and the owners prosecuted. This way, cyclists will be stripped of their uniforms and made to look like human beings. — Jeremy Clarkson

Thousands of years ago, weren't we capable of building enormous structures like the pyramids? Weren't we capable of worshiping gods, weaving, making fire, finding lovers and wives, sending written messages? Of course we were. But although we've succeeded in replacing slaves with wage slaves, all the advances we've made have been in the field of science. Human beings are still asking the same questions as their ancestors. In short, they haven't evolved at all. — Paulo Coelho

In Unistat, due to the strong encouragement of individualistic third-and fourth-circuit (semantic-moral) functions, slavery had grown so repugnant that it was formally "abolished" within a century after the formation of the pack constitution; it lingered on through inertia in the form of "wage slavery," which required that all primates not born into the sixty families that "owned" almost everything would have to "work" for those families or their corporations in order to get the tickets (called "money") which were necessary for survival. — Robert Anton Wilson

It is not only highly desirable but necessary that there should be legislation which shall carefully shield the interests of wage-workers, and which shall discriminate in favor of the honest and humane employer by removing the disadvantage under which he stands when compared with unscrupulous competitors who have no conscience and will do right only under fear of punishment. — Theodore Roosevelt

If US per capita income continues to grow at a rate of 1.5 percent a year, the country will have plenty of money to finance comfortable retirements and high-quality healthcare for all citizens, including those at the bottom of the wage ladder. — William Greider

Anyone who's tried to pay a heating bill, fill a prescription, or simply buy groceries knows all too well that the current minimum wage does not cut the mustard. — Sherrod Brown

So what are the effects of increasing minimum wages? Any Econ 101 student can tell you the answer: The higher wage reduces the quantity of labor demanded, and hence leads to unemployment. — Paul Krugman

You need to know that a member of Congress who refuses to allow the minimum wage to come up for a vote made more money during last year's one-month government shutdown than a minimum wage worker makes in an entire year. — William J. Clinton

The tax laws are written by men with considerable net worth, and with little understanding of what wage-earners must do to make ends meet. — Martin L. Gross

The minimum wage is the black teenage unemployment act. It is the guaranteed way of holding the poor, the minorities and the disenfranchised out of the mainstream is if you price their original services too high. — Arthur Laffer

Through a policy driven approach we have wage a war against poverty and we are confident we will win this war. — Narendra Modi

As the prosperity of the nation and the height of wage rates depend on a continual increase in the capital invested in its plants, mines and farms, it is one of the foremost tasks of good government to remove all obstacles that hinder the accumulation and investment of new capital. — Ludwig Von Mises

The liberal paradigm of regulation and license has led to a society where an 18-year-old girl has the right to public fornication in a pornographic movie
but only if she is paid the minimum wage. — Irving Kristol

Look. I'm your expert consultant for a rather pathetic monetary wage, and under that agreement I have the option of selecting a technical assistant. He's mine."

She blew out a breath, paced to the window. Paced back. "Not just yours. It makes him mine, too. I don't know how to deal with a teenaged type person."

"Ah, well, I'd say you'd deal with him as you deal with everyone else. You order him around, and if he argues or doesn't jump quickly enough you freeze his blood with one of those vicious looks you're so good at and verbally abuse him. It always works so well for you."

"You think so?"

"There, see." He cupped her chin. "There it is now. I can actually feel my blood running cold. — J.D. Robb

Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs (lesser developed countries)? I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that ... I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. — Lawrence Summers

My mother saved our home with a minimum wage job. But in the 1960s, a minimum wage job would support a family of three above the poverty line. Not today. Not even close. I understood right then that people can work hard, they can play by the rules, and they can still take a hard smack. — Elizabeth Warren

I wanted to earn a living wage and to see something nice about me in the 'New York Times.' I wanted my mother to be proud. I wanted all the things you want and also feel silly for wanting. I wanted readers to say they'd enjoyed something of mine - to see my photo in magazines where I'd seen photos of other writers. — David Lipsky

Morally bankrupt wage practices and laws cannot hold. — Eric Schneiderman

Girls, here's the truth about the Ban Bossy campaign: It's being spearheaded by a privileged group of elite feminists who have a very vested interest in stoking victim politics and exacerbating the gender divide. They actually encourage dependency and groupthink while paying lip service to empowerment and self-determination. They traffic in bogus wage disparity statistics, whitewashing the fact that what's actually left of that dwindling pay gap is due to the deliberate, voluntary choices women in the workforce make. — Michelle Malkin

During the war, the holders of power in all countries found it necessary to bribe the populations into cooperation by unusual concessions. Wage-earners were allowed a living wage, Hindus were told they were men and brothers, women were given the vote, and young people were allowed to enjoy those innocent pleasures of which the old, in the name of morality, always wish to rob them. The war being won, the victors set to work to deprive their tools of advantages temporarily conceded. — Bertrand Russell

I reject the idea that any job is too hard or too dirty for American workers to do. American workers just expect and demand to be paid a decent wage. — Jan C. Ting

So, if they hold aloof from you and wage not war against you and offer you peace, Allah alloweth you no way against them" (Qur'an 4:90). — Denise A. Spellberg

a prosperous country with higher wage rates per unit of time may have lower labor costs per unit of output than a Third World country where workers are not paid nearly as much. — Anonymous

Oftentimes when you have the federal government or others step in and start to raise minimum wage, what happens is you take away or reduce some people's opportunity to grab the bottom rung of the economic ladder to get the opportunities and the skills that you need to move up that economic ladder. — Kevin Madden

You desire and do not have; so you kill. And you covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war (James 4:1, 2). — Richard J. Foster

Tom was anxious about whether he could keep his job at the hospital or would have to go on relief, he exclaimed, "If I could not support my family, I'd as soon jump off the dock." That is, if the value of being a self-respecting wage-earner were threatened, Tom, like the salesman Willie Loman and countless other men in our society, would feel he no longer existed as a self, and might as well be dead. — Rollo May

The problem with saying "the personal is political" is twofold: You politicize what is personal ("Everyone must celebrate my lifestyle!") and you personalize the political ("Your opposition to the minimum wage hurts my feelings!").
This is how you un-think yourself out of a civilization; When politics becomes a fashion choice and fashion becomes political. If you wear your politics on your sleeve, it usually means you don't keep them in your brain where they belong. — Jonah Goldberg

It probably wouldn't be good for our economy for a bunch of these jobs to come back because, there's no way that people could be getting paid a living wage on some of these jobs - at least in order to be competitive in an international setting. — Barack Obama

It is no longer an unwritten law of American capitalism that industry will attempt to maintain wages at a level that allows a single wage to support a family. — Christopher Lasch

One day I said to my dad, 'Are you disappointed that I'm working a minimum-wage job and I didn't go to college?' I'll never forget his response. He said, 'It's not about how much money you make or what your job is, but it's more about your character. For that, I'm proud of you.' — Josh Dun

CIVILIAN OR MILITARY The governments of the world would like very much for you to make the distinction between civilian and military targets. This is interesting because they do not make that distinction when they wage their class warfare upon us. Is a family a military target when they are beaten and thrown in the street and their belongings are tossed in the gutter? There are no military targets. Likewise, there are no civilian targets. These are abstract ideas that are part of a nineteenth-century framework. We — Jesse Ball

The people who harvest America's food must be treated with respect and earn a living wage. — Frances Beinecke

Under wage labor, the art advances, the artisan declines. — Alexis De Tocqueville

If a man or a woman puts in an honest day's work, they should to be able to earn a living wage. — Richard J. Codey

Living in the modern age, death for virtue is the wage. So it seems in darker hours. Evil wins, kindness cowers. Ruled by violence and vice we all stand upon thin ice. Are we brave or are we mice, here upon such thin, thin ice? Dare we linger, dare we skate? Dare we laugh or celebrate, knowing we may strain the ice? Preserve the ice at any price? — Dean Koontz

It violates right order whenever capital so employs the working or wage-earning classes as to divert business and economic activity entirely to its own arbitrary will and advantage, without any regard to the human dignity of the workers, the social character of economic life, social justice, and the common good. — Pope Pius XI