Pope Francis Quotes

I was affected by the harshness of government, the reality of 16-hour days, and the pressures of modern communications.

It's weird when you stop being a person to a lot of folks and just become a weird talking point. It's like you become a meme, and you're not a person anymore, and people don't mind stealing your life.

It's as if all identity has been stolen from them, except their identity as slaves.

The life of labor does not make men, but drudges.

What are they going to do to me that they haven't done already? They took away my entire past. They took away my entire future. What's left for them to take?

The individual has become a mere cog in an enormous organization of things and powers which tear from his hands all progress, spirituality, and value in order to transform them from their subjective form into the form of a purely objective life.

The instant people specialize, it's in their interest to dehumanize the people their specialized function operates upon.

I don't do anything but sleep, when I'm not working. I have no life. I'm no fun. All I want to do is sleep and get ready for the next day. It's awesome.

The trouble with this wide-open pornography ... is not that it corrupts but that it desensitizes; not that it unleashes the passions but that it cripples the emotions; not that it encourages a mature attitude but that it is a reversion to infantile obsessions; not that it removes the blinders but that it distorts the view. Progress is proclaimed but love is denied. What we have is not liberation but dehumanization.

Communism is the final logic of the dehumanization of man.

Yes, sir, no, sir, clock in, clock out. Why were you late? Why are you not in today? That's not how humans are supposed to live.

Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life? Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork And drive the brute off? Six days of the week it soils With its sickening poison-- Just for paying a few bills! That's out of proportion.

Political economy regards the proletarian like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle.

Servitude degrades people to such a point that they come to like it.

We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men.

The slaves of developed industrial civilization are sublimated slaves.

Work that is pure toil, done solely for the sake of the money it earns, is also sheer drudgery because it is stultifying rather than self improving.

We are born into a world where alienation awaits us. We are potentially men, but are in an alienated state, and this state is not simply a natural system. Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.

Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts - a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments.

A plongeur is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the process, because they know nothing about him and consequently are afraid of him.

Talk of the abuses of slavery! Humbug! The thing itself is the essence of all abuse!

Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery. People are working every minute. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.

...boredom was as exhausting as backbreaking labor.

The degradation, the wrongs, the vices, that grow out of slavery, are more than I can describe. They are greater than you would willingly believe.