"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Buckminster Fuller, "The New York Magazine Environmental Teach-In" by Elizabeth Barlow in New York Magazine (30 March 1970), p. 30
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Refusal_of_work
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Refusal of work
48 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Refusal of work →
Related Quotes
"There is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant busi…"
"The wide chasm separating the inevitabilities of economic life from the Christian ideal ... kept the most devout grou…"
"Idleness is not just a psychological necessity, requisite to the construction of a complete human being; it constitut…"
"Do not do what you hate, for all things are plain in the sight of heaven."
"A man had better starve at once than lose his innocence in the process of getting his bread."
"It is above all the impersonal and economically rationalized (but for this very reason ethically irrational) characte…"
"Men make it such a point of honour to be fit for business that they forget to examine whether business is fit for a man."
"It is not a reproach but a compliment to learning, to say, that great scholars are less fit for business; since the t…"
"You made your rulers mighty, gave them guards, So now you groan 'neath slavery's heavy rod."
"The fact that people with rigorous ethical standards simply could not take up a business career was not altered by th…"