“The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
The Sorrows of Young Werther (I. May 17)

“A great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.”

— Oscar Wilde,
The Soul of Man Under Socialism

“Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine. And I have no doubt that it will be so. Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition.”

— Oscar Wilde,
The Soul of Man Under Socialism

“One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants. Were that machine the property of all, everybody would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the community.”

— Oscar Wilde,
The Soul of Man Under Socialism

“All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing.”

— Oscar Wilde,
The Soul of Man Under Socialism

“At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure — which, and not labour, is the aim of man — or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work.”

— Oscar Wilde,
The Soul of Man Under Socialism

“Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. And when scientific men are no longer called upon to go down to a depressing East End and distribute bad cocoa and worse blankets to starving people, they will have delightful leisure in which to devise wonderful and marvellous things for their own joy and the joy of every one else. There will be great storages of force for every city, and for every house if required, and this force man will convert into heat, light, or motion, according to his needs.”

— Oscar Wilde,
The Soul of Man Under Socialism

“Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”

— Oscar Wilde,
The Soul of Man Under Socialism

“I think that the sweetest freedom for a man on earth consists in being able to live, if he likes, without having the need to work.”

— Salvador Dalí,
Diary of a Genius (II. May 2, 1953)

“The heaviest tax is the tax of homage. The more competition prevails, the more we buy from the unknown and work for the unknown, the lower does this tax become, whereas it is really the standard for the loftiness of man's spiritual intercourse.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Human, All Too Human (Part II) (§2. 283)

“In our bourgeois Western world total labor has vanquished leisure. Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for non-activity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture—and ourselves.”

— Josef Pieper,
Leisure: The Basis of Culture

“The superficiality of the American is the result of his hustling. It needs leisure to think things out; it needs leisure to mature. People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.”

— Eric Hoffer,
The Passionate State of Mind

"There is no wisdom without leisure."

Ancient Jewish proverb

“If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.”

— Stephen Hawking, Science AMA Series

“But, although the individual is not man, man is yet present in the individual, and, like every spook and everything divine, has its existence in him. Hence political liberalism awards to the individual everything that pertains to him as ‘a man by birth’, as a born man, among which there are counted liberty of conscience, the possession of goods – in short, the ‘rights of man’; socialism grants to the individual what pertains to him as an active man, as a ‘laboring’ man; finally, humane liberalism gives the individual what he has as ‘a man’, that is, everything that belongs to humanity. Accordingly the single one [Einzige] has nothing at all, humanity everything; and the necessity of the ‘regeneration’ preached in Christianity is demanded unambiguously and in the completest measure. Become a new creature, become ‘man’!”

[…]

“But is my work then really, as the communists suppose, my sole competence? Or does not this consist rather in everything that I am competent for? And does not the workers' society itself have to concede this, in supporting also the sick, children, old people – in short, those who are incapable of work? These are still competent for a good deal, for instance, to preserve their life instead of taking it. If they are competent to cause you to desire their continued existence, they have a power over you. To him who exercised utterly no power over you, you would vouchsafe nothing; he might perish.”


— Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own