Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1639-1641

Put it this way: every Walmart with three hundred or more “associates” costs taxpayers roughly a million dollars in public assistance each year because the wages paid these employees don’t cover their food and health care.
Why Work?
Bran Dougherty-Johnson
The Baffler

 The more mechanical people to whom life is a shrewd speculation depending on a careful calculation of ways and means, always know where they are going, and go there. They start with the ideal desire of being the parish beadle, and in whatever sphere they are placed they succeed in being the parish beadle and no more. A man whose desire is to be something separate from himself, to be a member of Parliament, or a successful grocer, or a prominent solicitor, or a judge, or something equally tedious, invariably succeeds in being what he wants to be. That is his punishment. Those who want a mask have to wear it.
Oscar Wilde
De Profundis

 Ambitious professors, the ones who, like their students, want to get ahead in America, work furiously. Scholarship, even if pretentious and almost unreadable, is nonetheless labor-intensive. One can slave for a year or two on a single article for publication in this or that referred journal. These essays are honest: their footnotes reflect real reading, real assimilation, and real dedication. Shoddy work - in which the author cheats, cuts corners, copies from others - is quickly detected. The people who do this work have highly developed intellectual powers, and they push themselves hard to reach a certain standard: that the results have almost no practical relevance to the students, the public, or even, frequently, to other scholars is a central element in the tragi-comedy that is often academia.
Mark Edmundson
Who are you and what are you doing here
Best American Essays 2012

Edmundson: http://www.engl.virginia.edu/people/mwe