Work Quotes

"Identity is increasingly a matter of brand management."

"Work gives meaning to life."

"Labor is central to human existence."

"We are all engaged in the ongoing work of reality-maintenance."

"The maintenance of meaning requires ongoing social work and personal investment."

"Alienation is not a psychological problem but a fundamental condition of modern labor."

"Cultural production is a form of social labor, no less real than factory work."

"Work is the process of becoming who we are meant to be."

"Work is love made visible."

"Plausibility is maintained through conversation and ritual reinforcement of shared understandings."

"Ritual is not mere pageantry but the means by which we maintain social bonds and shared meanings."

"Society is a world of human meaning sustained by human activity."

"Meaning is maintained through institutions, but institutions are maintained through meaning."

"The decline of the Protestant work ethic marks a fundamental shift in American character."

"The ornament contains within it the rationalization of all human movement."

"The collective ornament expresses the logic of mass production through human bodies."

"The ornament demonstrates how bodies can be coordinated without genuine community."

"Economic relations form the foundation upon which all cultural and artistic expression is built."

"Intellectual work is never neutral; it always serves some social interest."

"Society continues through the creative work of human beings, not through inert tradition."

"The society produces individuals as it produces commodities."

"Work under capitalism is the slow death of the soul."

"I have never had any luck with a single line of work."

"The factory is the site of the true drama of our age."

"Work becomes meaningful only when it serves something beyond itself."

"Work that serves only profit is work that serves only emptiness."

"Alienation from labor is the fundamental condition of modern existence."

"Building and dwelling and thinking are for buildings what blood and heart and lungs are for the human body."

"Work in advanced industrial society often means the slow erosion of autonomous thought."

"Commodities contain within them crystallized social labor."