“It is an essential part of any such social system that education should be carried further than it usually is at present, and should aim, in part, at providing tastes which would enable a man to use leisure intelligently. I am not thinking mainly of the sort of things that would be considered ‘highbrow’. Peasant dances have died out except in remote rural areas, but the impulses which caused them to be cultivated must still exist in human nature. The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.”

— Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness

“No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin,
The Dispossessed (chapter 12)

“The method of a leisure class without duties was…extraordinarily wasteful. None of the members of the class had been taught to be industrious, and the class as a whole was not exceptionally intelligent. The class might produce one Darwin, but against him had to be set tens of thousands of country gentlemen who never thought of anything more intelligent than fox-hunting and punishing poachers.”

— Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness

“At present, the universities are supposed to provide, in a more systematic way, what the leisure class provided accidentally and as a by-product. This is a great improvement, but it has certain drawbacks. University life is so different from life in the world at large that men who live in academic milieu tend to be unaware of the preoccupations and problems of ordinary men and women; moreover their ways of expressing themselves are usually such as to rob their opinions of the influence that they ought to have upon the general public. Another disadvantage is that in universities studies are organized, and the man who thinks of some original line of research is likely to be discouraged. Academic institutions, therefore, useful as they are, are not adequate guardians of the interests of civilization in a world where everyone outside their walls is too busy for unutilitarian pursuits.”

— Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness

“In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and capacity. Men who, in their professional work, have become interested in some phase of economics or government, will be able to develop their ideas without the academic detachment that makes the work of university economists often seem lacking in reality. Medical men will have the time to learn about the progress of medicine, teachers will not be exasperatedly struggling to teach by routine methods things which they learnt in their youth, which may, in the interval, have been proved to be untrue.”

— Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness

“Above all, there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia. The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion. Since men will not be tired in their spare time, they will not demand only such amusements as are passive and vapid. At least one per cent will probably devote the time not spent in professional work to pursuits of some public importance, and, since they will not depend upon these pursuits for their livelihood, their originality will be unhampered, and there will be no need to conform to the standards set by elderly pundits.”

— Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness

“But it is not only in these exceptional cases that the advantages of leisure will appear. Ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion. The taste for war will die out, partly for this reason, and partly because it will involve long and severe work for all.”

— Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness

“Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle. Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish forever.”

— Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness

“They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price.”

― Khalil Gibran, Sand and Foam

“‘Labor’ is the living basis of private property, it is private property as the creative source of itself. Private property is nothing but objectified labor. If it is desired to strike a mortal blow at private property, one must attack it not only as a material state of affairs, but also as activity, as labor. It is one of the greatest misapprehensions to speak of free, human, social labor, of labor without private property. ‘Labor’ by its very nature is unfree, unhuman, unsocial activity, determined by private property and creating private property. Hence the abolition of private property will become a reality only when it is conceived as the abolition of ‘labor’ (an abolition which, of course, has become possible only as a result of labor itself, that is to say, has become possible as a result of the material activity of society and which should on no account be conceived as the replacement of one category by another).”

— Karl Marx, Draft of an Article on Friedrich List's book: Das nationale System der politischen Ökonomie (§2)

“A slave, Marcus Cato said, should be working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work is needed or not, he must work, because work in itself is good—for slaves, at least. This sentiment still survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless drudgery.

I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think.”

— George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (chapter 22)

“A plongeur is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he would be dangerous if he had leisure.… I say this of the plongeur because it is his case I have been considering; it would apply equally to numberless other types of worker.”

— George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (chapter 22)

“The chief deficiency of active people. – Active people are usually deficient in the higher activity: I mean that of the individual. They are active as officials, merchants, scholars, that is as generic beings, but not as quite distinct separate and single individuals; in this respect they are lazy. It is the misfortune of the active that their activity is almost always a little unreasonable. For instance, we must not ask the money-making banker the reason of his restless activity: it is foolish. The active roll as the stone rolls, according to the stupidity of mechanics. All mankind is divided, as it was at all times and is still, into slaves and freemen; for whoever has not two-thirds of his day for himself is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a merchant, an official, or a scholar.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Human, All Too Human (Part I) (283)

“Today as always, people fall into two groups: slaves and free people. Whoever does not have two-thirds of their day for themself, is a slave, whatever they may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Human, All Too Human

“In favour of the idle. – As a sign that the value of a contemplative life has decreased, scholars now vie with active people in a sort of hurried enjoyment, so that they appear to value this mode of enjoying more than that which really pertains to them, and which, as a matter of fact, is a far greater enjoyment. Scholars are ashamed of otium [idleness]. But there is one noble thing about idleness and idlers. If idleness is really the beginning of all vice, it finds itself, therefore, at least in near neighbourhood of all the virtues; the idle man is still a better man than the active.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Human, All Too Human (Part I) (284)