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“-->* They can expect nothing but their labour for their pains.”
Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) said by 1616 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[On the Labour MP Rosie Duffield refusing to consider Izzard a woman] She has got to join the 21st century. She’s got to catch up with the rest of us. The vast majority of the world is now moving forwards … The millennium has happened and we’re 22 years into it. So come and join us in the 21st century.”
Eddie Izzard (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They kissed each other with a deep joy. What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life — to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?”
George Eliot (1819–1880) said by 1880 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every thing in the world is purchased by labour.”
David Hume (1711–1776) said by 1776 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Much labour is required in trees; Well must the ground be digg’d, and better dress’d, New soil to make, and meliorate the rest.”
John Dryden (1631–1700) said by 1700 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The peasant, innocent of all these ills, With crooked ploughs the fertile fallow tills, And the round year with daily labour fills.”
John Dryden (1631–1700) said by 1700 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To dress the vines new labour is required, Nor must the painful husbandman be tired.”
John Dryden (1631–1700) said by 1700 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Root up wild olives from thy labour’d lands.”
John Dryden (1631–1700) said by 1700 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The generality labour under the delusion, that when they have lighted and filled their rooms, they have done their all. They never were more in error. Lighting is much—crowding is much also—but there lacks “something more exquisite still.” This something the countess possessed in its perfection. Any can assemble a crowd, but few can make it mingle.”
Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) said by 1838 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Difficulty is as needful to appreciation as labour is to existence.”
Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) said by 1838 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For socialism is not merely the labour question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth.”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) said by 1881 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This country will not always be an uncomfortable place for a country gentleman to live in, and it is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class. I am afraid that Labour disagrees with me in that. On this matter I am a crusted Tory. I am of the opinion of the ancient Jewish book which says "there is no wisdom without leisure.”
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) first seen 1923 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech, (28 March 1923), Seanad Éireann (Irish Free Senate), on the Damage to Property (Compensation) Bill
“Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labour of its unfamiliar thought.”
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) first seen 1927 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Olivia Shakespear (24 March 1927)
“Labour is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul. Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?”
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) said by 1939 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We carry with us the wonders, we seek without us: There is all Africa, and her prodigies in us; we are that bold and adventurous piece of nature, which he that studies, wisely learns in a compendium, what others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume.”
Thomas Browne (1605–1682) said by 1682 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.”
Thomas Browne (1605–1682) said by 1682 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Justice is the product of nature and labour”
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) said by 1865 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Until recently baby production was largely dependent on slave labour; as soon as women are allowed to answer the question "Would you like to squeeze as many objects the size of a watermelon out of your body as it takes to kill you?" they generally answer "No, thank you." This leads to falling birthrates everywhere women are not kept enslaved and ignorant of the alternatives.”
James Nicoll (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. Whigs and Tories, Liberal party and Labour party — for what do they battle except their own prestige?”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thou, O God, dost sell us all good things at the price of labour.”
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) said by 1519 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That man is of supreme folly who always wants for fear of wanting; and his life flies away while he is still hoping to enjoy the good things which he has with extreme labour acquired.”
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) said by 1519 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When the speeches of Wilson, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George, the worst of the predators, the wild beasts of imperialism, are repeated here by Martov in the name of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party ... then I say to myself that we have to be on the alert and to realise that the Cheka is indispensable!”
Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) first seen 1919 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Address to the Seventh All-Russia Congress (5 December 1919); Collected Works, Vol. 30.
“Until the "higher" phase of communism arrives, the socialists demand the strictest control by society and by the state over the measure of labour and the measure of consumption; but this control must start with the expropriation of the capitalists, with the establishment of workers' control over the capitalists, and must be exercised not by a state of bureaucrats, but by a state of armed workers.”
Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) said by 1924 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Labour Party is a thoroughly bourgeois party, because, although made up of workers, it is led by reactionaries, and the worst kind of reactionaries at that, who act quite in the spirit of the bourgeoisie. It is an organisation of the bourgeoisie, which exists to systematically dupe the workers with the aid of the British Noskes and Scheidemanns.”
Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) said by 1924 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No Dutch, no English, and therefore no planters, no coolie labour, no cash crops, no systematic exhaustion of our soil. Also no whisky, no Calvinism, no syphilis, no foreign administrators. We were left to go our own way and take responsibility for our own affairs.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Labour's appalling agenda, encouraging the teaching of homosexuality in schools, and all the rest of it.”
Boris Johnson (born 1964) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Spectator (15 April 2000)
“[On Tony Blair] He's lost the plot, people tell me. He's drifting rudderless in the wide Sargasso Sea of New Labour's ideological vacuum.”
Boris Johnson (born 1964) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Blair dead in the water? No such luck", The Daily Telegraph, 29 April 2004, p. 24.
“For 10 years we in the Tory party have become used to Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing, and so it is with a happy amazement that we watch as the madness engulfs the Labour party.”
Boris Johnson (born 1964) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From a Daily Telegraph column "Blair has nothing more to say to us: he should go at once" (7 September 2006) p. 22, as cited in "Boris apology to Papua New Guinea" BBC News (8 September 2006)
“And I can tell you that your courage and the sheer exuberant nerve with which you stuck it to your enemies, especially in New Labour, you have thereby earned the thanks and admiration of millions of Londoners, even if you think that they have a funny way of showing it today.”
Boris Johnson (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I will beat Labour and] put Nigel Farage back in his box”
Boris Johnson (born 1964) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Tory leadership: Johnson warns party of risk of Brexit 'extinction', BBC News (5 June 2019)
“To people off alone, as we were, there is something stirring about finding evidences of human labour and care in the soil of an empty country. It comes to you as a sort of message, makes you feel differently about the ground you walk over every day.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He that thinks diversion may not lie in hard and painful labour, forgets the early rising, hard riding, heat, cold and hunger of huntsmen, which is yet known to be the constant recreation of men of the greatest condition.”
John Locke (1632–1704) said by 1704 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our position is different as regards the Socialist Party. In the first place we are careful to make a distinction between party Socialism and the Socialism of Labour.”
Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) first seen 1921 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Attitude of Fascismo towards Communism and Socialism,” speech (21 June 1921) delivered in the Italian parliament Chamber, p 197
“And I will go on criticising Socialism, and opposing Socialism because it is bad for Britain – and Britain and Socialism are not the same thing...It's the Labour Government that have brought us record peace-time taxation. They’ve got the usual Socialist disease – they’ve run out of other people's money.”
Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to the Conservative Party Conference (10 October 1975)
“I sometimes think the Labour Party is like a pub where the mild is running out. If someone doesn't do something soon, all that's left will be bitter. (Laughter). And all that's bitter will be Left.”
Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to the Conservative Party Conference (10 October 1975)
“Our aim is not just to remove our uniquely incompetent Government from office—it is to destroy the socialist fallacies—indeed the whole fallacy of socialism—that the Labour Party exists to spread.”
Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to Junior Carlton Club Political Council (4 May 1976)
“To many of us it seems that there is precious little difference between the policies of the Communist Party and the policies of the Labour Party.”
Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Prime Minister's Questions (11 December 1980)
“I do not believe that people who go on strike in this country have a legitimate cause. Throughout the period of the Labour Government and this one, I have never supported any strikes in this country.”
Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Prime Minister's Questions (22 June 1982)
“The community charge is a way of asking people to pay for what they vote for, and when they do, they will vote against Labour authorities.”
Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Prime Ministers' Questions (20 July 1989)
“When will they [Labour] learn? You cannot build Jerusalem in Brussels.”
Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to Conservative Candidates Conference" (22 March 1992)
“Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds.”
Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: At a dinner reception in 2002, as related by Conor Burns in the ConservativeHome, 11 April 2008.
“[To Labour frontbencher Lisa Nandy] You said rapists should be transferred to women's prisons if they self-identify as women.”
J. K. Rowling (born 1965) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Given that you're one of the biggest reasons many women on the Left no longer trust Labour to defend their rights, do you stand by these comments?”
J. K. Rowling (born 1965) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Comments on X (formerly known as Twitter), as cited in "JK Rowling says Lisa Nandy is reason women on left don't trust Labour", The Independent (12 October 2023).
“[To Alastair Campbell, former spokesman for Tony Blair, who had commented Badenoch was not speaking about her role as Secretary of State for Business and Trade] Badenoch is also minister for women and equalities. Thanks once again for highlighting Labour's complacency and indifference towards the rights of half the electorate.”
J. K. Rowling (born 1965) first seen 2024 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Posts on X (3 June 2024), as cited in "JK Rowling attacks Labour’s ‘indifference to women’ in trans row", The Times (3 June 2024)
“At the age of five years to enter a spinning-cotton or other factory, and from that time forth to sit there daily, first ten, then twelve, and ultimately fourteen hours, performing the same mechanical labour, is to purchase dearly the satisfaction of drawing breath. But this is the fate of millions, and that of millions more is analogous to it.”
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) said by 1860 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Vol II: "On the Vanity and Suffering of Life", as translated by R. B. Haldane, and J. Kemp in The World as Will and Idea (1886), p. 389
“Why, do nothing; be like a gentleman, be idle; the curse of man is labour. Wipe thy bum with testones, and make ducks and drakes with shillings.”
George Chapman (1559–1634) said by 1634 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Note: testones=sixpences (though it was also a name for the depreciated Henry VII shilling).—Spencer Hazelton, Elizabethan Plays (1933), p. 479
“We have to create a better Britain, to bestow more care on the health and well-being of the people, and to ameliorate further the conditions of labour.”
George V (1865–1936) first seen 1918 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in the Royal Gallery of the Palace of Westminster (19 November 1918), quoted in The Times (20 November 1918), p. 8
“I am a Democrat. All of my family have been persons of peasant origin, who have wrung a meagre sufficiency from a harsh world by the labour of their hands. I acknowledge no one my superior merely on grounds of a more fortunate destiny, a favoured birth. I did what any such man would do when confronted with Queen Victoria; I fell immediately to my knees.”
Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Green Belt is a Labour achievement — and we mean to build on it.”
John Prescott (1938–2024) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Remark on BBC Radio (19 January 1998), quoted in "Passing Comment", The Times (31 January 1998)