“As Western nations became more prosperous, leisure, which had been put off for several centuries in favor of the pursuit of property, the means to leisure, finally began to be of primary concern. But, in the meantime, any notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men’s taste and capacity to live it, had disappeared.”

— Allan Bloom,
The Closing of the American Mind (I. §3)

Abolish money and wage and salary and profit system and introduce common ownership and common production for the use not only of your immediate neighbors, but for the whole country later on. There should be no question of not only buying and selling and profiteering for anybody, but also no question of bartering and exchange even in kind. We produce as much as we can of what is necessary for all in the village, town, or quarter.

Let there be no employers and owners, no salaries and wages, differential or equal. Let all the bodies of persons be treated as one and indivisible.

Let everyone go to work voluntarily wherever he wants and is accepted—making work easy and pleasant for all, like play, and making it short. Money produces nothing—nay, production is kept down by money and by private ownership, profit, and the supply and demand of buying and selling.

— M. P. T. Acharya, Anarchist Manifesto

“I distrust the perpetually busy; always have. The frenetic ones spinning in tight little circles like poisoned rats. The slower ones, grinding away their fourscore and ten in righteousness and pain. They are the soul-eaters.”

— Mark Slouka, Quitting the Paint Factory

“Idleness is not just a psychological necessity, requisite to the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press. How does it do this? By allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about it. By giving the inner life (in whose precincts we are most ourselves) its due. Which is precisely what makes idleness dangerous. All manner of things can grow out of that fallow soil. Not for nothing did our mothers grow suspicious when we had ‘too much time on our hands.’ They knew we might be up to something. And not for nothing did we whisper to each other, when we were up to something, ‘Quick, look busy.’”

— Mark Slouka, Quitting the Paint Factory

“Ask for work. If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they don't give you work or bread, take bread.”

— Emma Goldman

“If you are losing your leisure, look out! – It may be you are losing your soul.”

— Logan P. Smith, letter to Virginia Woolf

“How many of the wage class, as a class, are there who can avoid obeying the commands of the master (employing) class, as a class? Not many, are there?

Then are you not slaves to the money power as much as were the black slaves to the Southern slaveholders? Then we ask you again: What are you going to do about it? You had the ballot then. Could you have voted away black slavery? You know you could not because the slaveholders would not hear of such a thing for the same reason you can’t vote yourselves out of wage-slavery.”

— Lucy Parsons,
Americans! Arouse Yourselves!

Plato said that virtue has no master. If a person does not honor this principle and rejoice in it, but is purchasable for money, he creates many masters for himself.

You request my presence at the Olympic Games, and for that reason you have sent envoys. For myself, I would come for the spectacle of physical struggle, except that I would be abandoning the greater struggle for virtue.

In my judgment excellence and wealth are direct opposites.

— Apollonius of Tyana, letter to Euphrates

Soldiers! Don't give yourselves to brutes — men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel; who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder! Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men — machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men!

Soldiers! Don't fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the 17th Chapter of St. Luke, it is written: ‘the Kingdom of God is within man’ — not one man, nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people, have the power — the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.

— Charlie Chaplin,
The Great Dictator (1940)

“Practical life is not necessarily directed toward other people, as some think; and it is not the case that practical thoughts are only those which result from action for the sake of what ensues. On the contrary, much more practical are those mental activities and reflections which have their goal in themselves and take place for their own sake.”

— Aristotle, Politics (Bk. VII)

“I personally do not believe in the unwieldy organizations of the present day. The very fact that they are ugly shows that they are in discordance with the whole creation. The vast powers of nature do not reveal their truth in hideousness, but in beauty. Beauty is the signature which the Creator stamps upon His works when He is satisfied with them. All our products that insolently ignore the laws of perfection and are unashamed in their display of ungainliness bear the perpetual weight of God's displeasure.

So far as your commerce lacks the dignity of grace it is untrue. Beauty and her twin brother Truth require leisure and self-control for their growth. But the greed of gain has no time or limit to its capaciousness. Its one object is to produce and consume. It has pity neither for beautiful nature nor for living human beings. It is ruthlessly ready without a moment's hesitation to crush beauty and life out of them, moulding them into money.

It is this ugly vulgarity of commerce which brought upon it the censure of contempt in our earlier days, when men had leisure to have an unclouded vision of perfection in humanity. Men in those times were rightly ashamed of the instinct of mere money-making. But in this scientific age money, by its very abnormal bulk, has won its throne. And when from its eminence of piled-up things it insults the higher instincts of man, banishing beauty and noble sentiments from its surroundings, we submit. For we in our meanness have accepted bribes from its hands and our imagination has grovelled in the dust before its immensity of flesh.”

— Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism

“But its very unwieldiness and its endless complexities are its true signs of failure. The swimmer who is an expert does not exhibit his muscular force by violent movements, but exhibits some power which is invisible and which shows itself in perfect grace and reposefulness. The true distinction of man from animals is in his power and worth which are inner and invisible.

But the present-day commercial civilization of man is not only taking too much time and space but killing time and space. Its movements are violent, its noise is discordantly loud. It is carrying its own damnation because it is trampling into distortion the humanity upon which it stands. It is strenuously turning out money at the cost of happiness. Man is reducing himself to his minimum in order to be able to make amplest room for his organizations. He is deriding his human sentiments into shame because they are apt to stand in the way of his machines.”

— Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism

“There can be no doubt that children should be taught those useful things which are really necessary, but not all things, for occupations are divided into liberal and illiberal; and to young children should be imparted only such kinds of knowledge as will be useful to them without vulgarizing them. And any occupation, art, or science which makes the body, or soul, or mind of the freeman less fit for the practice or exercise of virtue is vulgar; wherefore we call those arts vulgar which tend to deform the body, and likewise all paid employments, for they absorb and degrade the mind. There are also some liberal arts quite proper for a freeman to acquire, but only in a certain degree, and if he attend to them too closely, in order to attain perfection in them, the same evil effects will follow.”

— Aristotle, Politics (Bk. VIII)

“All paid jobs…absorb and degrade the mind.”

— Aristotle, Politics (Bk. VIII)

“Personally, I have nothing against work, particularly when performed, quietly and unobtrusively, by someone else. I just don't happen to think it's an appropriate subject for an ‘ethic.’”

— Barbara Ehrenreich,
Goodbye to the Work Ethic

“I do not love subordination… You say my mother wishes me to be employed. I could not help laughing at that. Am I not sufficiently employed [aktiv; active]? And is it not in reality the same, whether I shell peas or count lentils? The world runs on from one folly to another; and a man who works at another's will, not for his own passion or his own need, but for money or honor, is always a fool.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
The Sorrows of Young Werther (I. July 20)

Does not external work react on the mind? It does, only if it has its constant suggestions to our intellect, which is the master, and not merely its commands for our muscles, which are slaves. In this clerk-ridden country, for instance, we all know that the routine of clerkship is not mentally stimulating. By doing the same thing day after day mechanical skill may be acquired; but the mind, like a mill-turning bullock, will be kept going round and round a narrow range of habit. That is why, in every country man has looked down on work which involves this kind of mechanical repetition. Carlyle may have proclaimed the dignity of labour in his stentorian accents, but a still louder cry has gone up from humanity, age after age, testifying to its indignity. “The wise man sacrifices the half to avert a total loss” — so says our Sanskrit proverb. Rather than die of starvation, one can understand a man preferring to allow his mind to be killed. But it would be a cruel joke to try to console him by talking of the dignity of such sacrifice.

— Rabindranath Tagore,
The Cult of the Charka

In fact, humanity has ever been beset with the grave problem, how to rescue the large majority of the people from being reduced to the stage of machines. It is my belief that all the civilisations which have ceased to be, have come by their death when the mind of the majority got killed under some pressure by the minority; for the truest wealth of man is his mind. No amount ​of respect outwardly accorded, can save man from the inherent ingloriousness of labour divorced from mind. Only those who feel that they have become inwardly small can be belittled by others…

— Rabindranath Tagore,
The Cult of the Charka

If the cultivation of science by Europe has any moral significance, it is in its rescue of man from outrage by nature, — not its use of man as a machine but its use of the machine to harness the forces of nature in man’s service. One thing is certain, that the all-embracing poverty which has overwhelmed our country cannot be removed by working with our hands to the neglect of science. Nothing can be more undignified drudgery than that man’s knowing should stop dead and his doing go on for ever.

— Rabindranath Tagore,
The Cult of the Charka

“Nature has made no shoemaker nor smith. Such occupations degrade the people who exercise them.”

— Plato, Republic (Bk. V)