Quotes & Sayings About Workmen

There are many skillful apprentices, but few master workmen. — Henry David Thoreau

With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city. Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and grey, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I do believe CDSs [credit default swaps] have been miscast, much as poor workmen tend to blame their tools. — Blythe Masters

Where there is a wine-shop, there are the elements of disease and the frightful source of all that is at enmity with the interests of the workmen. — Charles Forbes Rene De Montalembert

The hinder portion scalding-house good eating Curve B in addition to the usual baths and ablutions military police sumptuousness of the washhouse risking misstatements kept distances iris to iris queen of holes damp, hairy legs note of anger chanting and shouting konk sense of "mold" on the "muff" sense of "talk" on the "surface" konk2 all sorts of chemical girl who delivered the letter give it a bone plummy bare legs saturated in every belief and ignorance rational living private client bad bosom uncertain workmen mutton-tugger obedience to the rules of the logical system Lord Muck hot tears harmonica rascal
that's chaos can you produce chaos? Alice asked certainly I can produce chaos I said I produced chaos she regarded the chaos chaos is handsome and attractive she said and more durable than regret I said and more nourishing than regret she said — Donald Barthelme

Furthermore, there is no good ethical or economic reason for asking workmen and current producers to forego all economic gain in order to increase the purchasing power of all the wealth accumulated in past years. — Charles E. Wilson

Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters. — Adam Smith

No greater care is required upon any works than upon such as are to withstand the action of water; for this reason, all parts of the work need to be done exactly according to the rules of the art which all workmen know, but few observe. — Frontinus

A Glimpse
A glimpse through an interstice caught,
Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room around the stove late of a winter night, and I unremark'd seated in a corner,
Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand,
A long while amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking and oath and smutty jest,
There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word. — Walt Whitman

When an apprentice gets hurt, or complains of being tired, the workmen and peasants have this fine expression: "It is the trade entering his body." Each time that we have some pain to go through, we can say to ourselves quite truly that it is the universe, the order and beauty of the world, and the obedience of God that are entering our body. — Simone Weil

I love everything that makes up a milieu, the rolling of the carriages and the noise of the workmen in Paris, the cries of a thousand birds in the country, the movement of the ships on the waters. I love also absolute, profound silence, and, in short, I love everything that is around me, no matter where I am. — George Sand

Others will give away large alms in order to be considered charitable people. Should they not give these out of their own wages, which so often they squander on trifles? If this has happened to you, do not forget that you are obliged to pay back to the person concerned all that you gave to the poor without the knowledge or consent of your employers. Then again, there is the one who has been entrusted by his employer with the supervision of the staff, or of workmen, who gives out wine and all sorts of other things to them if they ask him. — John Vianney

Good workmen are seldom rich. — George Herbert

Not to oversee workmen is to leave them your purse open. — Benjamin Franklin

It builds cathedrals before the workmen have moved a stone, and it destroys them before the elements have worn down their arches. It is the architect of the buildings of the spirit, and it is also their solvent: - and the spiritual precedes the material. — Alfred North Whitehead

God is more interested in the workman than in the work. — Warren W. Wiersbe

Like so much in the centre, it was under construction or reconstruction. Scaffolding, cranes, the temporary business of architects and workmen, the portable toilets, the short-term fencing, the crash-barriers and the skips. Rubble, more rubble. There was a history of Berlin to be written on the topic of rubble. — Gail Jones

Now in regard to trades and other means of livelihood, which ones are to be considered becoming to a gentleman and which ones are vulgar, we have been taught, in general, as follows. First, those means of livelihood are rejected as undesirable which incur people's ill-will, as those of tax-gatherers and usurers. Unbecoming to a gentleman, too, and vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labour, not for artistic skill; for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

Sure, I watched the workmen come and lower large pieces of rotten sheetrock and lift new clean panels on a pulley
from that same window months ago, and I could have written then, but I must have sensed her coming, the smoker, so I waited. — Kristen Henderson

I was there when the first dreams came off the assembly line. I was there when the corrupted visions that had congealed in the vats were pincered up and hosed off and carried down the line to be dropped onto the rolling belts. I was there when the first workmen dropped their faceplates and turned on their welding torches. I was there when they began welding the foul things into their armor, when they began soldering the antennae, bolting on the wheels, pouring in the eye-socket jelly. I was there when they turned the juice on them and I was there when the things began to twitch. — Harlan Ellison

Even the finest workman needs to inspect his work critically. — Robert Fulghum

When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, nearly in the same way as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting, I speak from experience, will the study of natural history become! — Charles Darwin

In cheap years, it is pretended, workmen are generally more idle, and in dear ones more industrious than ordinary. A plentiful subsistence, therefore, it has been concluded, relaxes, and a scanty one quickens their industry. That a little more plenty than ordinary may render some workmen idle, cannot well be doubted; but that it should have this effect upon the greater part, or that men in general should work better when they are ill fed than when they are well fed, when they are disheartened than when they are in good spirits, when they are frequently sick than when they are generally in good health, seems not very probable. Years of dearth, it is to be observed, are generally among the common people years of sickness and mortality, which cannot fail to diminish the produce of their industry. — Adam Smith

The Roman Road is the greatest monument ever raised to human liberty by a noble and generous people. It runs across mountain, marsh and river. It is built broad, straight and firm. It joins city with city and nation with nation. It is tens of thousands of miles long, and always thronged with grateful travellers. And while the Great Pyramid, a few hundred feet high and wide, awes sight-seers to silence - though it is only the rifled tomb of an ignoble corpse and a monument of oppression and misery, so that no doubt in viewing it you may still seem to hear the crack of the taskmaster's whip and the squeals and groans of the poor workmen struggling to set a huge block of stone into position - — Robert Graves

I have told you some of his faults, reader: as to his good points, he was one of the most honourable and capable men in Yorkshire; even those who disliked him were forced to respect him. He was much beloved by the poor, because he was thoroughly kind and very fatherly to them. To his workmen he was considerate and cordial. When he dismissed them from an occupation, he would try to set them on to something else, or, if that was impossible, help them to remove with their families to a district where work might possibly be had. — Charlotte Bronte

By half-past one the last drop of pleasure had evaporated, leaving nothing but headaches. We perceived that we were not splendid inhabitants of a splendid world, but a crew of underpaid workmen grown squalidly and dismally drunk. We went on swallowing the wine, but it was only from habit, and the stuff seemed suddenly nauseating ...
Most of my Saturday nights went in this way. On the whole, the two hours when one was perfectly and wildly happy seemed worth the subsequent headache. For many men in the quarter, unmarried and with no future to think of, the weekly drinking-bout was the one thing that made life worth living. — George Orwell

To live in Manhattan is to be persistently amazed at the worlds squirreled inside one another, the chaotic intricacy with which realms interweave, like those lines of television cable and fresh water and steam heat and outgoing sewage and telephone wire and whatever else which cohabit in the same intestinal holes that pavement demolishing workmen periodically wrench open into daylight and to our passing, disturbed glances. — Jonathan Lethem

There would be no idling in a co-operative workshop. Each workman, being an employer, has a spur to his own industry, and has a pecuniary reason for being watchful of the industry of his fellow workmen. — Leland Stanford

Because what happens is, as the economy suffers, tax revenues go down. But unlike businesses, where at least your variable costs go down, in government your variable costs go up: unemployment insurance, workmen's compensation, health care benefits, welfare, you name it. — Meg Whitman

Nothing could be more important than that the work of a soldier is well done. No tools will make a man a skilled workmen, or master of defense, or be of any use to him who has not learned how to handle them and has never bestowed any attention on them. — Plato

On fine summer evenings, at the hour when the warm streets are empty and the maids play shuttlecock in doorways, he would open his window and lean out on the sill. The river, which turns this part of Rouen into a sort of shabby little Venice, flowed by beneath him, yellow, violet or blue between its bridges and its railings. Some workmen were crouched down on the bank, washing their arms in the water. On poles projecting from the lofts up above, skeins of cotton hung out to dry. In front, away beyond the roof-tops, was a pure expanse of sky with a red sun setting. How good it would be over yonder, now! How cool under the beeches! He opened his nostrils to breathe in the wholesome country smells - which failed to reach him here. — Gustave Flaubert

Few of the early houses in New England were painted, or colored, as it was called, either without or within. Painters do not appear in any of the early lists of workmen. — Alice Morse Earle

Faith is a kind of winged intellect. The great workmen of history have been men who believed like giants. — Charles Henry Parkhurst

You've been telling us about how to secure peace, but come on, now, General - just among us Rotarians and Rotary Anns - 'fess up! With your great experience, don't you honest, cross-your-heart, think that perhaps - just maybe - when a country has gone money-mad, like all our labor unions and workmen, with their propaganda to hoist income taxes, so that the thrifty and industrious have to pay for the shiftless ne'er-do-weels, then maybe, to save their lazy souls and get some iron into them, a war might be a good thing? Come on, now, tell your real middle name, Mong General! — Sinclair Lewis

The general fact of surplus value, namely that the workmen does not get the full value of his labours, and that he is taken advantage of by the capitalist, is obvious. — Edward Carpenter

My luck at the gambling table was varied; sometimes I was fifty to a hundred dollars ahead, and at other times I had to borrow money from my fellow workmen to settle my room rent and pay for my meals. — James Weldon Johnson

Successful salesmen, authors, executives and workmen of every sort need patience. The great liability of youth is not inexperience but impatience. — William Feather

After all, there is such a thing as looking like a gentleman. There are men whose class no dirt or rags can hide, any more than they could Ulysses. I have seen such men in plenty among workmen, too; but, on the whole, the gentleman
by whom I do not mean just now the rich
have the superiority in that point. But not, please God, forever. Give us the same air, water, exercise, education, good society, and you will see whether this "haggardness," this "coarseness" (etc., for the list is too long to specify), be an accident, or a property, of the man of the people. — Charles Kingsley

The more I move among workers and factories and other plants, the stronger I become convinced that it is advisable to have as [a company] president a practical man, preferably one who has risen from the very bottom of the ladder. Workmen, I find, have far more respect for such men than for collar-and-cuff executives knowing little or nothing about the different kinds of work which have to be done by the workers. Wherever circumstances call for placing a financier or lawyer or a papa's son at the head of a large organization, he should be made chairman or some other title, but not president. — B.C. Forbes

It was many years ago that I got out of a crewtruck in the national forest and ran toward a large glowing object hovering in the darkening Arizona sky. But when I made that fateful choice to leavethe truck, I was leaving behind more than just my six fellow workmen. I was leaving behind forever all semblance of a normal life, running headlong toward an experience so overwhelmingly mind-rending in its effects, so devastating in itsaftermath, that my life would never - could never - be the same again. — Travis Walton

Workmen's compensation, hours and conditions of labor are cold consolations, if there be no employment. — Calvin Coolidge

The employment of the poor in roads and public works, and a tendency among landlords and persons of property to build, to improve and beautify their grounds, and to employ workmen and menial servants, are the means most within our power and most directly calculated to remedy the evils arising from that disturbance in the balance of produce and consumption. — Thomas Malthus

If they are good workmen, they may be of Asia, Africa, or Europe. They may be Mohometans, Jews or Christians of any Sect, or they may be Atheists. — George Washington

No man, however benevolent, liberal, and wise, can use a large fortune so that it will do half as much good in the world as it would if it were divided into moderate sums and in the hands of workmen who had earned it by industry and frugality. The piling up of estates often does great and conspicuous good ... But no man does with accumulated wealth so much good as the same amount would do in many hands. — Rutherford B. Hayes

An emperor knows how to govern when poets are free to make verses, people to act plays, historians to tell the truth, ministers to give advice, the poor to grumble at taxes, students to learn lessons aloud, workmen to praise their skill and seek work, people to speak of anything, and old men to find fault with everything. — Will Durant

Till the master of all good workmen shall set us to work anew. — Rudyard Kipling

The wind, as a direct motive power, is wholly inapplicable to a system of machine labour, for during a calm season the whole business of the country would be thrown out of gear. Before the era of steam-engines, windmills were tried for draining mines; but though they were powerful machines, they were very irregular, so that in a long tract of calm weather the mines were drowned, and all the workmen thrown idle. — William Stanley Jevons

Mr. Thornton," said Margaret, shaking all over with her passion, "go down this instant, if you are not a coward. Go down and face them like a man. Save these poor strangers, whom you have decoyed here. Speak to your workmen as if they were human beings. Speak to them kindly. Don't let the soldiers come in and cut down poor-creatures who are driven mad. I see one there who is. If you have any courage or noble quality in you, go out and speak to them, man to man. — Elizabeth Gaskell

A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more; otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation. — Adam Smith

Must necessarily be small; and those employed in every different branch of the work can often be collected into the same workhouse, and placed at once under the view of the spectator. In those great manufactures, on the contrary, which are destined to supply the great wants of the great body of the people, every different branch of the work employs so great a number of workmen that it is impossible to collect them all into the same workhouse — Adam Smith

The disorganisers are those who want to level everything: property, comforts, the price of commodities, the various services rendered to the State ... who want the workmen in the camp to receive the salary of the legislator ... who want to level even talents, knowledge, the virtues, because they themselves have none of these things. — Jacques Pierre Brissot

Now burst above the city's cold twilight
The piercing whistles and the tower-clocks:
For day is done. Along the frozen docks
The workmen set their ragged shirts aright.
Thro' factory doors a stream of dingy light
Follows the scrimmage as it quickly flocks
To hut and home among the snow's gray blocks. --
I love you, human labourers. Good-night!
Good-night to all the blackened arms that ache!
Good-night to every sick and sweated brow,
To the poor girl that strength and love forsake,
To the poor boy who can no more! I vow
The victim soon shall shudder at the stake
And fall in blood: we bring him even now. — Trumbull Stickney

When workmen strive to do better than well, they do confound their skill in covetousness. — William Shakespeare

On a small square, wood is being cut for the city school. Cords of healthy, crisp timber are piled high and melt slowly, one log after another, under the saws and axes of workmen. Ah, timber, trustworthy, honest, true matter of reality, bright and completely decent, the embodiment of the decency and prose of life! However deep you look into its core, you cannot find anything that is not apparent on its evenly smiling surface, shining with that warm, assured glow of its fibrous pulp woven in a likeness of the human body. In each fresh section of a cut log a new face og the human body. In each fresh section of a cut log a new face appears, always smiling and golden. Oh, the strange complexion of timber, warm eithout exaltation, completely sound, fragrant, and pleasant! — Bruno Schulz

The humblest workman has his place, Which no one else can fill. — Maud Lindsay

[In eighteenth-century Britain] engineers for the most began as simple workmen, skilful and ambitious but usually illiterate and self-taught. They were either millwrights like Bramah, mechanics like Murdoch and George Stephenson, or smiths like Newcomen and Maudslay. — John Desmond Bernal

I believe in the honest craft of workmen. — Robert A. Heinlein

There is nothing fairer than workmen having unions of their mutual benefit. — Will Rogers

In course of time the Brothers Cowper removed the manufacture of their printing machines from London, to Manchester. There they found skilled and energetic workmen, ready to carry their plans into effect. — James Nasmyth

Physicians attend to the business of physicians, and workmen handle the tools of workmen.
[Lat., Quod medicorum est
Promittunt medici, tractant fabrilia fabri.] — Horace

Bright specks that were commute ships, little eggs that carried businessmen and white-collar workers around. The huge transport tubes that shot masses of workmen to factories and labor camps from their housing units. — Philip K. Dick

So, from generation to generation, the spiritual church is rising upwards toward its perfection; and, though one after another the workmen pass away, the fabric remains, and the great Master-builder carries on the undertaking. Be it ours to build in our portion in a solid and substantial manner, so that they who come after us may be at once thankful for our thoroughness, and inspired by our example. — William Mackergo Taylor

God buries His workmen, but not His work.. — Henrietta Mears

On Ove's side of the track it's empty but for three overdimensioned municipal employees in their midthirties in workmen's trousers and hard hats, standing in a ring and staring down into a hole. Around them is a carelessly erected loop of cordon tape. One of them has a mug of coffee from 7-Eleven; another is eating a banana; the third is trying to poke his cell phone without removing his gloves. It's not going so well. And the hole stays where it is. And still we're surprised when the whole world comes crashing down in a financial crisis, Ove thinks. When people do little more than standing around eating bananas and looking into holes in the ground all day. — Fredrik Backman

Refrain from drink which is the source of all evil-and the ruin of half the workmen in this Country. — George Washington

God buries His workmen but carries on His work. — Charles Wesley

Howbeit your faith seeth but the black side of Providence, yet it hath a better side, and God shall let you see it. We know that all things work together for good to them that love God; hence I infer that losses, disappointments, ill tongues, loss of friends, houses or country, are God's workmen, set on work to work out good to you, out of everything that befalleth you. — Samuel Rutherford

A man who tries to make the workmen believe that their employers are their natural enemies is indeed the worst enemy of workmen. For the employees of yesterday are the employers of today, and the employees of today can and will partly be the employers of tomorrow. — William J.H. Boetcker

The workmen in a factory may have a shadowy, unknown absentee "employer" - the thousands of individual owners of stock - whom "management" represents and tries to please by extra dividends. The workman's livelihood is at the disposition of strangers who make a single demand of their representatives: higher profits. — Fulton J. Sheen

Old houses were scaffolding once and workmen whistling. — T. E. Hulme

And while English workmen are often unemployed and in great want, Indian women weave cotton by machinery, for the Far East at wages of six-pence a day. In short, the intelligent manufacturers are fully aware that the day is not far off when they will not know what to do with the "factory hands" who formerly wove cotton-cloth for export from England. — Pyotr Kropotkin

Thady begins his memoirs of the Rackrent Family by dating MONDAY MORNING, because no great undertaking can be auspiciously commenced in Ireland on any morning but MONDAY MORNING. 'Oh, please God we live till Monday morning, we'll set the slater to mend the roof of the house. On Monday morning we'll fall to, and cut the turf. On Monday morning we'll see and begin mowing. On Monday morning, please your honour, we'll begin and dig the potatoes,' etc.
All the intermediate days, between the making of such speeches and the ensuing Monday, are wasted: and when Monday morning comes, it is ten to one that the business is deferred to THE NEXT Monday morning. The Editor knew a gentleman, who, to counteract this prejudice, made his workmen and labourers begin all new pieces of work upon a Saturday. — Maria Edgeworth

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

The bad workmen who form the majority of the operatives in many branches of industry are decidedly of opinion that bad workmen ought to receive the same wages as good. — John Stuart Mill

At last I went to the artisans, for I was conscious that I knew nothing at all, as I may say, and I was sure that they knew many fine things; and in this I was not mistaken, for they did know many things of which I was ignorant, and in this they certainly were wiser than I was. But I observed that even the good artisans fell into the same error as the poets; because they were good workmen they thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom — Plato

Los Angeles didn't get like this often. He hated it when it did. And this time it was holding on. It had been brutal at the cemetery three weeks ago. His father's nine widows had looked ready to drop. The savage light had leached the color from the flowers. The savage heat had got at the mound of earth from the grave even under its staring green blanket of fake grass. He'd stayed to watch the workmen fill the grave. The earth was dry. Even the sharp walls of the grave were dry. What the hell was he doing remembering that? — Joseph Hansen

In many instances the conduct of colored workmen, and those who have spoken for them, has not been in asking or demanding that equal rights be accorded to them as to white workmen, but somehow conveying the idea that they are to be petted and coddled and given special consideration and special privilege. Of course that can't be done. — Samuel Gompers

Today in May 1938, the world around us suffers from the anxiety which the unemployment of millions brings with it. In Germany we begin to be anxious because we have not enough workmen. — Adolf Hitler

Between building the new house on our newly subdivided lot, continuing work on some small flip homes, and managing the rentals, Chip had more work than he could do himself, so he had put a crew of workmen together. "The Boys," as we called them, were a talented bunch of hardworking guys who were just as adaptable as Chip seemed to be when it came to making my crazy ideas become reality. I truly could say, "Hey, why don't we take that tree out of the front yard and hang it upside down in the master bedroom," and they would do it, no questions asked. (All right, maybe there'd be a little head scratching. But then they'd shrug their shoulders and get to work.) — Joanna Gaines

Social security was the most emotional issue that session. Republicans protested that if the administration bill were passed, children would no longer support their parents, the payroll tax would discourage workmen so much that they would quit their jobs, and that, taken all in all, the measure would remove the romance of life. — William Manchester

But things have been so admirably arranged by the Divine inventor of social order that in this, as in everything else, political economy and morality, far from clashing, agree; and the wisdom of Aristus is not only more dignified, but still more profitable, than the folly of Mondor. And when I say profitable, I do not mean only profitable to Aristus, or even to society in general, but more profitable to the workmen themselves - to the trade of the time. — Frederic Bastiat

In this country, where workmen move about frequently and with facility, the unions suffer in their harmony and stability. It — William Graham Sumner

A bad workman quarrels with his tools. — George Herbert

The present Mr. Parslow was teaching his son the craft; the two of them and their three workmen would scramble like industrious termites over the scaffolding they'd erected at the corner of the library, or over the roof of the chapel, and haul up bright new blocks of stone or rolls of shiny lead or balks of timber. The — Philip Pullman

Out of great Russia came three
dusky syllables workmen took guns and went out to die
for: Bread, Peace, Land. — Carl Sandburg

Some mechanism in my sub-consciousness took the dominant characteristics of various prize-fighters, gunmen, bootleggers, oil field bullies, gamblers, and honest workmen I had come in contact with, and combining them all, produced the amalgamation I call Conan the Cimmerian. — Robert E. Howard

I have no sympathy whatever with those who would grudge our workmen and our common people the very highest acquisitions which their taste or their time or their inclination would lead them to realize. — Thomas Chalmers

No man saw the building of the New Jerusalem, the workmen crowded together, the unfinished walls and unpaved streets; no man heard the clink of trowel and pickaxe; it descended out of heaven from God. — John Robert Seeley

If workmen are denied any increase in real wages and they can look forward only to a better standard of living through reduction of prices, progress for them is terribly slow, and they become impatient and dissatisfied. — Charles E. Wilson

Growing up in an old city, you learn history's one true lesson: that history fades. Nothing sticks together for very long without immense effort. His own strong house is in a constant process of disintegration. He calls workmen to come repair the roof, paint the porches, replace sills; but even this work has no permanence, it will have to be done again in four or five years. Is this noble activity for a man? Patching, gluing, temporizing, begging for time? — Josephine Humphreys

When Earth's last picture is painted And the tubes are twisted and dried When the oldest colors have faded
And the youngest critic has died
We shall rest, and faith, we shall need it
Lie down for an aeon or two
'Till the Master of all good workmen Shall put us to work anew
And those that were good shall be happy They'll sit in a golden chair
They'll splash at a ten league canvas With brushes of comet's hair
They'll find real saints to draw from Magdalene, Peter, and Paul
They'll work for an age at a sitting And never be tired at all.
And only the Master shall praise us. And only the Master shall blame.
And no one will work for the money.
No one will work for the fame.
But each for the joy of the working, And each, in his separate star,
Will draw the thing as he sees it.
For the God of things as they are! — Rudyard Kipling

We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations [that is, unions or colluding organizations] of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual price. — Adam Smith

Skinners guts were in turmoil from the beer and curry at the weekend and a viscous, silent eye-stinging killer of a fart slipped out of him, as poignantly weeping as a lover's last farewell, just as the lift stopped at the next floor to let in two men wearing overalls. Everybody suffered in silence. As the workmen got off at the following level, Skinner seized the opportunity, announcing, - That is minging, looking towards the departing workers. He knew that when it came to farting everybody turned into Old Etonian High Court Judges. Men would always be suspected before women and men in working clothes would always be blamed before men in suits. Those were the rules.

From "The Bedroom Secrets Of The Master Chefs — Irvine Welsh

The majority of any society comprised, Smith knew, not landlords or merchants, but "servants, laborers, and workmen of different kinds," who derived their income from wages. Their welfare was the prime concern of economic policy, as Smith conceived it. "No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable," he wrote. "It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged." The chief economic concern of the legislator, in Smith's view, ought to be the purchasing power of wages, since that was the measure of the material well-being of the bulk of the population. (p. 64) — Jerry Z. Muller

The workmen's revolution, with the terrors of destruction and murder, not only threatens us, but we have already been living upon its verge during the last thirty years, and it is only by various cunning devices that we have been postponing the crisis ... The hatred and contempt of the oppressed people are increasing, and the physical and moral strength of the richer classes are decreasing: the deceit which supports all this is wearing out, and the rich classes have nothing wherewith to comfort themselves. — Leo Tolstoy

The course that will restore to the workmen a father's duties and responsibilities, between which and themselves the state has now stepped, is for them to reject all forced contributions from others, and to do their own work through their own voluntary combinations. — Auberon Herbert

Aided by the young George Pullman, who would later make a fortune building railway cars, Chesbrough launched one of the most ambitious engineering projects of the nineteenth century. Building by building, Chicago was lifted by an army of men with jackscrews. As the jackscrews raised the buildings inch by inch, workmen would dig holes under the building foundations and install thick timbers to support them, while masons scrambled to build a new footing under the structure. Sewer lines were inserted beneath buildings with main lines running down the center of streets, which were then buried in landfill that had been dredged out of the Chicago River, raising the entire city almost ten feet on average. Tourists walking around downtown Chicago today regularly marvel at the engineering prowess on display in the city's spectacular skyline; what they don't realize is that the ground beneath their feet is also the product of brilliant engineering. — Steven Johnson