1079 – Buckminster Fuller on Earning a Living

“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”

-Buckminster Fuller

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1030 – “Your work is not to drag the world kicking and screaming into a new awareness. Your job is to simply do your work… sacredly, secretly, silently… and those with eyes to see and ears to hear, will respond.”

-anonymous

953 – “Through all the years of experimenting and research, I never once made a discovery. I start where the last man left off.”

-Thomas Edison

908 – Charles Bukowski and the Lack of Ambition

“It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”

-Charles Bukowski

675 – “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

–English Proverb

550 – “The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what it true.”

–Carl Sagan

442 – Simple Truths Message

“Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any other controlling private power.
The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living. Both lessons hit home. Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing.”

–Franklin D Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States of America

344 – “Writing is one of the few careers which you essentially train yourself, the other two major ones being juggling and pickpocketing.”

–Maureen Johnson

337 – “[Capitalism is] remarkably resilient and can be traced to a process [called] ‘cheapness.’ … Seven ‘things,’ [which] aren’t physical objects as much as they are a hidden social, ecological and economic infrastructure: nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives. [Where] cheapness is a process of responding to economic crises by devaluing each of those [structures] so that capitalism can continue to concentrate wealth in the hands of the already-wealthy…. Capitalism values cheapness above all else.”

–Chris Winters

He was discussing Jason W Moore and Raj Patel’s book The History of the World in Seven Cheap Things with Raj Patel

302 – “It’s important to understand CEOs are not job creators. Nor are the rich. Nor are corporations. The job creators are the Middle Class and the Poor, whose purchases create jobs. If the Middle Class and Poor aren’t paid enough, job creation slows. Which is why a higher minimum wage creates jobs.”

–Robert Reich, 22nd United States Secretary of Labor