"He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist."
— Francis Of Assisi

"I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser. "
— Mother Jones

"Don't mistake activity with achievement."
— John Wooden

"I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to
amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence."
— Eugene Debs

"Failing to listen to the woman is one of the biggest mistakes a practitioner can make."
— Helen Varney

"I spent the last Friday of summer vacation spreading hot, sticky tar across the roof of George Washington High. My companions were Dopey, Toothless, and Joe, the brain surgeons in charge of building maintenance. At least they were getting paid. I was working forty feet above the ground, breathing in sulfur fumes from Satan's vomitorium, for free.

Character building, my father said.

Mandatory community service, the judge said. Court-ordered restitution for the Foul Deed. He nailed me with the bill for the damage I had done, which meant I had to sell my car and bust my hump at a landscaping company all summer. Oh, and he gave me six months of meetings with a probation officer who thought I was a waste of human flesh.

Still, it was better than jail.

I pushed the mop back and forth, trying to coat the seams evenly. We didn't want any rain getting into the building and destroying the classrooms. Didn't want to hurt the school. No, sir, we sure didn't."
— Laurie Halse Anderson (Twisted)

"I emphasize this because some of my colleagues, for whose academic attainments I have great respect, argue" 'You assume too much; this is not proved; this is not strictly scientific. We disagree with your neurology and your psychiatry is misleading, therefore you must be wrong.' My reply has been, with all humility: 'Yes, of course,' and I have returned to the labor ward to be greeted by happy women with their newborn babies in their arms: 'How right you are, Doctor, it is so much easier that way.' That is what really matters to the clinician. He should use the method that gives the best and safest result from all points of view until something better is discovered."
— Grantly Dick-Read

"If any man tells you he loves America, yet hates labor, he is a liar. If any man tells you he trusts America, yet fears labor, he is a fool."
— Abraham Lincoln

"We have a secret in our culture, and it’s not that birth is painful; it’s that women are strong."
— Laura Stavoe Harm

"Nil sine magno labore ("Nothing without great effort"). "
— Motto of Brooklyn College, New York

"For the first six months, all whe wanted was honest labor, finely crafted novels, and surf."
— Eve Babitz (Sex and rage: Advice to young ladies eager for a good time : a novel)

"It is important to keep in mind that our bodies must work pretty well, or their wouldn't be so many humans on the planet."
— Ina May Gaskin (Ina May's Guide to Childbirth)

"It would be a mistake, though, to consider care by family doctors or midwives inferior to that offered by obstetricians simply on the grounds that obstetricians need not refer care to a family physician or midwife if no complications develop during a course of labor."
— Ina May Gaskin (Ina May's Guide to Childbirth)

"'Labour day is a great American holiday that people
celebrate by going out and buying products
made in China' "
— David Letterman on the late show

"She had had the pain; it had been like being boiled alive in scalding oil and not being able to die to get free of it"
— Katie Nolan/Betty Smith

"...work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice and need."
— Voltaire (Candide)

"What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures, to make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful, and childhood more happy and bright."
— Samuel Gompers

"It is as great a crime to leave a woman alone in her agony and deny her relief from her suffering as it is to insist upon dulling the consciousness of a natural mother who desires above all things to be aware of the final reward of her efforts, whose ambition is to be present, in full possession of her senses, when the infant she already adores greets her with its first loud cry and the soft touch of its restless body upon her limbs."
— Grantly Dick-Read

"Childbirth is normal until proven otherwise."
— Peggy Vincent (Baby Catcher: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife)

"Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another. "
— Anatole France (The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard)

"In no way can we improve a normal pregnancy and labour in a healthy woman; we can only change it, but not for the better."
— G. J. Kloosterman

"Implicit in the stare of those eyes, the power of those knobbly hands, was labor's historic threat of violence against capital."
— Edmund Morris (Theodore Rex)

"It would be a mistake, though, to consider care by family doctors or midwives inferior to that offered by obstetricians simply on the grounds that obstetricians need not refer care to a family physician or midwife if no complications develop during a course of labor."
— Ina May Gaskin (Ina May's Guide to Childbirth)

"The truth beyond the fetish's glimmering mirage is the relationship of laborer to product; it is the social account of how that object came to be. In this view every commodity, beneath the mantle of its pricetag, is a hieroglyph ripe for deciphering, a riddle whose solution lies in the story of the worker who made it and the conditions under which it was made."
— Leah Hager Cohen (Glass, Paper, Beans: Revelations on the Nature and Value of Ordinary Things)