Unemployment Quotes

“I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions--poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed--which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.

It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“It is difficult for me to imagine what "personal liberty" is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.

Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.”
― Joseph Stalin

“Our country is the best country in the world. We are swimming in prosperity and our President is the best president in the world. We have larger apples and better cotton and faster and more beautiful machines. This makes us the greatest country in the world. Unemployment is a myth. Dissatisfaction is a fable. In preparatory school America is beautiful. It is the gem of the ocean and it is too bad. It is bad because people believe it all. Because they become indifferent. Because they marry and reproduce and vote and they know nothing.”
― John Cheever

“If heaven really exists: then heaven is the job, hell is unemployment, while life is merely an interview.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“As long as we remain vigilant at building our internal abundance—an abundance of integrity, an abundance of forgiveness, an abundance of service, an abundance of love—then external lack is bound to be temporary.”
― Marianne Williamson, Everyday Grace

“And that's just the beginning. More and more, conventional wisdom says that the responsible thing is to make the unemployed suffer. And while the benefits from inflicting pain are an illusion, the pain itself will be all too real.”
― Paul Krugman

“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“I suppose there hasn’t been a single month since the war, in any trade you care to name, in which there weren’t more men than jobs. It’s brought a peculiar, ghastly feeling into life. It’s like on a sinking ship when there are nineteen survivors and fourteen lifebelts. But is there anything particularly modern in that, you say? Has it anything to do with the war? Well, it feels as if it had. The feeling that you’ve got to be everlastingly fighting and hustling, that you’ll never get anything unless you grab it from somebody else, that there’s always somebody after your job, that next month or the month after they’ll be reducing staff and it’s you that’ll get the bird – that, I swear, didn’t exist in the old life before the war.”
― George Orwell, Coming up for Air

“I cannot tell you how many quiet mornings I have spent sitting around hotel rooms and furnished apartments in the United States and Mexico, smoking cigarettes, plunking the guitar, and watching Perry Mason--telling myself, "Well, at least I don't have a day job. And there is nothing wrong with that. I am not guilty of anything. Perry would see that in a minute.”
― Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy

“Those who had the remaining jobs would have to buy the cheapest stuff possible with their drastically reduced wages, and in order for the manufacturers to keep that stuff cheap, it would have to be made by fifteen-year-olds in China.”
― Michael Francis Moore

“Eric, you need to look at the whole picture," the PM said. "You look at the jobless as a huge pile of scrap and you're looking for what can be recycled. That's good. That's your job. But what you don't realise is that this pile of scrap itself serves a purpose. I need my zeros, Eric. They put fear in people; fear of crime and terrorism. They are a stark reminder to the stakeholders that what they despise today, they may end up joining tomorrow. It keeps them obedient. Remember that!”
― Mark Cantrell, Citizen Zero

“Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not the fundamental right to labour the earth returns to the unemployed.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“They are closing the mine in two weeks, they say. Six days a week bumping down in the gondola, pecking out the rocks and hauling them back up, doing it again the next day for twenty-seven years, one cave-in, three thin raises, and a failed strike. Where am I going to go every day, what am I going to do with all that sunshine?”
― Lou Beach, 420 Characters

“When we're unemployed, we're called lazy; when the whites are unemployed it's called a depression.”
― Jesse Jackson

“Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”
― Andrew Mellon

“According to Albert Einstein and Indian Government, Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned; According to me, what remains is poverty and unemployment.”
― P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar

“Why does Joe Normie think it’s a litmus test for morality if one returns one’s shopping cart? Big-box stores put out of business local retailers, they automated their systems to reduce employees, and they got customers to be their own cashiers without getting paid for their labor, and yet to prove I’m a good person, I’m supposed to do more unpaid work for them to streamline their operation?”
― Jarod Kintz, Eggs, they’re not just for breakfast

“البته این روش صغراباجی برای حل مشکل بی‌کاری معروف بود و به خاطر شغل سازمانی‌اش، که دخالت در کار دیگران و توصیه های صدمن یک غاز بود، اعتقاد داشت وقتی کسی بی‌کار است و کاری بلد نیست اگر ازدواج کند همه چیزش درست می‌شود. یعنی به جای یادگرفتن کار و آموزش، از طریق آمیزش می‌توان مشکل یک بی‌کار را حل کرد.”
― مهرداد صدقی, آبنبات هل‌دار

“Poverty ... is a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilisation. It is the lot of man – it is the source of wealth, since without poverty there would be no labour, and without labour there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.”
― Patrick Colquhoun

“When things are going well, they’ll go yeah, corporate jobs and software jobs are great! The financial growth, benefits, perks and the workspaces are the best! And when layoffs happen, the tables are turned. Instead, now they say, why become a consultant, you should have chosen a more ‘ever-green’ job.”
― Srivani Bairi, Freshly Laidoff

“Almost cracked a job through a referral from an old colleague but a college fresher was chosen over me. Life is so cut throat in this economy! Time for a post-failure pep talk followed by a probable nervous breakdown (snacks included).”
― Srivani Bairi, Freshly Laidoff

“Make your new path.”
― Bald Solomon, Path Blocked: Overcoming Unemployment

“The first thought of writing this book came to me two years ago after I had driven through the mining district of Lanarkshire. The journey took me through Hamilton, Airdrie and Motherwell. It was a warm, overcast summer day; groups of idle, sullen-looking young men stood at the street corners; smaller groups were wandering among the blue-black ranges of pit-dumps which in that region are the substitute for nature; the houses looked empty and unemployed like the tenants; and the road along which the car stumbled was pitted and rent, as if it had recently been under shell-fire. Everything had the look of a Sunday which had lasted for many years, during which the bells had forgotten to ring - a disused, slovenly everlasting Sunday.”
― Edwin Muir, Scottish Journey

“Unemployment benefits are cut off to the long term unemployed in the USA!”
― Steven Magee

“Anne, üşüyorum sobayı yakamaz mısın?"
"Kömürümüz yok."
"Neden?"
"Çünkü baban işsiz kaldı."
"Neden?"
"Fazla kömür olduğu için.”
― Gündüz Vassaf, Cehenneme Övgü: Gündelik Hayatta Totalitarizm

“If he is a worker, the ubiquitous fact of unemployment teaches him that the supply of labour is always greater than the demand.”
― Brealey & Myers, Principles of Corporate Finance

“At the root of capitalism poverty one always finds unemployment and underemployment what Mark called the industrial reserve army which directly deprive their victims of income and undermine the security and bargaining power of those with whom the unemployed compete for scarce jobs.”
― SWEEZY Paul M. BARAN Paul A., Le capitalisme monopoliste

“Crime sucked the lifeblood from the new South Africa like a deadly leech, leaving it debilitated and wracked by fear and insecurity.”
― Misha Glenny, McMafia: A Journey through the Global Criminal Underworld

“And no matter how upbeat they are—no matter how ingenious and flexible—the unemployed and underemployed understand that the clock is always ticking in the background. The longer you are unemployed, the less likely you are to find an appropriate job, and entries like “sales associate,” “limo driver,” or “server” do not make an attractive filling for the growing Gap in one’s résumé. At the same time, you are inexorably aging past the peak of occupational attractiveness, which seems to lie somewhere in the midthirties now. Experience is not an advantage; in fact, as Richard Sennett notes of corporate employment, “as a person’s experience accumulates, it loses value.” So once you fall into the low-wage, survival-job trap, there’s a good chance that you will remain there—an unwilling transplant from a more spacious and promising world.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“The little settlements we lived in-He-Dog, Upper Cut Meat, Parmelee, St. Francis, Belvidere-were places without hope where bodies and souls were being destroyed bit by bit. Schools left many of us almost illiterate. We were not taught any skills. The land was leased to white ranchers. Jobs were almost nonexistent on the reservation, and outside the res whites did not hire Indians if they could help it. There was nothing for the men
to do in those days but hit the bottle. The men were psychologically crippled and thus my mother did not have much choice when it came to picking a husband. The men had nothing to live for, so they got drunk and drove off at ninety miles an hour in a car without lights, without brakes, and without destination, to die a warrior's death.”
― Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman