labor-saving machinery

You call your thousand material devices "labor-saving machinery," yet you are forever "busy." With the multiplying of your machinery you grow increasingly fatigued, anxious, nervous, dissatisfied. Whatever you have, you want more; and wherever you are you want to go somewhere else. You have a machine to dig the raw material for you..., a machine to manufacture [it]..., a machine to transport ]it]..., a machine to sweep and dust, one to carry messages, one to write, one to talk, one to sing, one to play at the theater, one to vote, one to sew... and a hundred others to do a hundred other things for you, and still you are the most nervously busy man in the world... your devices are so many sharp spurs which urge you on to invent more machinery and to do more business.

"An Oriental Writer", as quoted in Wise Men from the East and from the West by Abraham Mitrie Rihbany. Houghton Mifflin. 1922. As found in Strength to Love by Martin Luther King, Jr. Harper & Row. 1963. Fortress Press Gift Edition 2010. p. 72, 73

Nature possesses the secret of happiness, and no one has been able to steal it from her. The happiest of men would be he who, working intelligently and laboring with his hands, drawing comfort and liberty from the exercise of is intelligent strength, should have time to live through his heart and his brain, to comprehend his own work and that of God. Happiness would be wherever the mind, the heart and the arm should work together beneath the eye of Providence, so that a holy harmony should exist between the munificence of God and the rapture of the human soul.

George Sand

La Mare au Diable. As quoted in Cross Creek. By Majorie Kinnan Rawlings. 1942. Mockingbird Books Inc. p.259

the pattern of the Sabbath

As we consider the pattern of the Sabbath and the sacrament in our own lives, there appear to be three things the Lord requires of us: first, to keep ourselves unspotted from the world; second, to go to the house of prayer and offer up our sacraments; and third, to rest from our labors. 

L. Tom Perry, "The Sabbath and the Sacrament." General Conference April 2011

child-workers in Bangladesh

In 1993, child-workers in Bangladesh were found to be producing clothing for Wal-Mart and Senator Tom Harkin proposed legislation banning imports from countries employing underage workers. The direct result was that Bangladeshi textile factories stopped employing children. But did the children go back to school? Did they return to happy homes? Not according to Oxfam, which found that the displaced child workers ended up in even worse jobs, or on the streets - and that a significant number were forced into prostitution.


Paul Krugman, Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science by Charles Wheelan. W.W. Norton & Company. 2002. P.202. Originally in Krugman's "Hearts and Heads," New York Times, April 22, 2001.