Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1880-1882

 What is needed, surely, is a change of attitude. One must return to the Aristotelian definition of leisure as the freedom from the necessity of labour, by which he meant the necessity of being occupied at any task which you had to perform but didn't want to. Leisure has nothing to do with time; it is a state; and the idea of "using" time is foreign to the idea of leisure.

We come back, then, to freedom. Leisure equals freedom. A society that truly values freedom must also truly value leisure. Leisure also connotes cultural and intellectual activity as well as community service. (In Greek times almost everybody played the flute or the lyre.) John Farina argues that the really free men [sic] of our time are the educated men of leisure: the Vincent Masseys, the Winston Churchills, the John Kennedys. They are free because they are free to make a choice, unfettered by want, ignorance, or the narrow prison of the "job."

Is it too much to expect that in the New Democracy of the future this kind of free choice will be available to all?
Pierre Berton,
The Smug Minority, p. 77

 Three men — Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates — have among them as much wealth as the bottom half of U.S. society. In a society of pervasive ignorance, such wealth is viewed as the outcome of the actions and successes of the individual actors. But in a society in which civic literacy and reason rule, such wealth would be considered characteristic of an economy appropriately named casino capitalism. In a society in which 80 percent of U.S. workers live paycheck to paycheck, and 20 percent of all children live below the poverty line, such inequalities in wealth and power constitute forms of domestic terrorism — that is, state-initiated violence or terrorism practiced in one’s own country against one’s own people.
Henry A. Giroux,
Truthout

If men [sic] were not disposed to continue selling their living activity, the impotence of Capital would be revealed; Capital would cease to exist; its last remaining potency would be the power to remind people of a bypassed form of everyday life characterized by daily universal prostitution.
George Woodcock