Division Of Labor Quotes

“In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”
― Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program

“I know I can’t drive a truck. And I can’t run a bank. And I can’t count. And I can’t lead a movement. But I can f*ck up your mind.”
― James Baldwin

“Joan Williams at the Center for WorkLife Law said "My strongest advice to young women: Don't just try to find a man who's supportive of women. That's a threshold. But consider, what is his attitude toward himself and ambition? That's what determines your future. If he's ambitious and feels entitled to that ambition, you're going to end up embattled, marginalized, and divorced.”
― Darcy Lockman, All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership

“And such in fact is the behaviour of the specialist. In politics, in art, in social usages, in the other sciences, he will adopt the attitude of primitive, ignorant man; but he will adopt them forcefully and with self-sufficiency, and will not admit of- this is the paradox- specialists in those matters. By specialising him, civilisation has made him hermetic and self-satisfied within his limitations; but this very inner feeling of dominance and worth will induce him to wish to predominate outside his speciality. The result is that even in this case, representing a maximum of qualification in man- specialisation- and therefore the thing most opposed to the mass-man, the result is that he will behave in almost all spheres of life as does the unqualified, the mass-man.”
― José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses

“Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter? What does architecture amount to in the experience of the mass of men? I never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and natural an occupation as building his house. We belong to the community. It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man; it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve? No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“I became my own worst enemy, conflicted about my right to ask, self-conscious about my rising anger, and too often stuck with the choice between fighting or just taking care of it, whatever it was, on my own.”
― Darcy Lockman, All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership

“Much of the story we have told falls outside the boundaries of modern academic disciplines and their respective histories. Contemporary economics focuses on issues of efficiency in allocation, political science on institutions of governmental power, political theory on questions of justice, sociology on social groups as defined by interactions outside the market. Some division of intellectual labor is of course productive, and the conceptual lenses that each discipline brings to bear may genuinely help us see an aspect of reality that would otherwise remain undetected. Yet those concerned with the moral implications and ramifications of the market--as any self-critical person in modern society ought to be--get a very skewed picture when they view it through only one of these lenses. Seeing the market with the added perspectives offered by the thinkers treated here provides us with a richer and more rounded view.”
― Jerry Z. Muller, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought

“There is today a division of labor between the elite and the masses. In medieval Europe aristocrats spent their money carelessly on extravagant luxuries whereas peasants lived frugally minding every penny. Today the tables have turned. The rich take great care managing their assets and investments, while the less well-heeled go into debt buying cars and televisions they don't really need.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, קיצור תולדות האנושות

“Men and women do not live by culture alone,
the vast majority of them throughout history have been deprived of the chance of living by it at all, and those few who are fortunate enough to live by it now are able to do so because of the labour of those who do not.”
― Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction

“It hadn't felt necessary to learn more about my mother outside of her existence on the periphery of my life. She cleaned our clothes and bought us groceries. Made our meals, mopped and dusted, trimmed the tree. My father was the one I'd admired. He was the one I'd wanted to be like.”
― Kristen Arnett, Mostly Dead Things

“Furthermore, to the same degree in which the division of labour increases, is the labour simplified. The special skill of the labourer becomes worthless. He becomes transformed into a simple monotonous force of production, with neither physical nor mental elasticity. His work becomes accessible to all; therefore competitors press upon him from all sides. Moreover, it must be remembered that the more simple, the more easily learned the work is, so much the less is its cost of production, the expense of its acquisition, and so much the lower must the wages sink—for, like the price of any other commodity, they are determined by the cost of production. Therefore, in the same measure in which labour becomes more unsatisfactory, more repulsive, do competition increase and wages decrease.”
― Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit

“Every expansion of the personal division of labour brings advantages to all who take part in it.”
― Ludwig von Mises

“Moi, ça me plaît mieux de travailler aux champs, ou de m'occuper des bêtes. Même couper le bois. Mais lui il aime ça, faire la cuisine, le ménage, et aussi le bricolage.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“...intelektualni rad ne bi mogao postojati bez fizičkog rada ... Kad bi znanstvenici morali biti i kuhari, vodoinstalateri, zidari, tipografi i slično, ne bi imali vremena za proučavanje. Svaki filozofski rad pretpostavlja nepreglednu masu fizičkih radnika, isto kao i simfonija ili katedrala”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right