The Sourcerer decided that the topic of unemployment is so much in the news today that it would be interesting to see what pundits throughout multiple generations had to say on this subject.  I think you’ll find these quotes worth reviewing:

• Unemployment is capitalism’s way of getting you to plant a garden.  ~Orson Scott Card
• A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune’s inequality exhibits under this sun.  ~Thomas Carlyle
• You take my life when you do take the means whereby I live.  ~William Shakespeare
• A man who has no office to go to – I don’t care who he is – is a trial of which you can have no conception.  ~George Bernard Shaw
• The trouble with unemployment is that the minute you wake up in the morning you’re on the job.  ~Slappy White
• Of all the aspects of social misery nothing is so heartbreaking as unemployment.  ~Jane Addams, 1910
• Cessation of work is not accompanied by cessation of expenses.  ~Cato the Elder
• The hardest work in the world is being out of work.  ~Whitney Young, Jr.
• Hunger is not the worst feature of unemployment; idleness is.  ~William E. Barrett
• An “acceptable” level of unemployment means that the government economist to whom it is acceptable still has a job.  ~Author Unknown
• Unemployment diminishes people.  Leisure enlarges them.  ~Mason Cooley
• Unemployment is like a headache or a high temperature – unpleasant and exhausting but not carrying in itself any explanation of its cause.  ~William Henry Beveridge
• We believe that if men have the talent to invent new machines that put men out of work, they have the talent to put those men back to work.  ~John F. Kennedy
• When I quit working, I lost all sense of identity in about fifteen minutes.  ~Paige Rense
• I do not believe we can repair the basic fabric of society until people who are willing to work have work.  Work organizes life.  It gives structure and discipline to life.  ~Bill Clinton
• What is the good of being a genius if you cannot use it as an excuse for being unemployed?  ~Gerald Barzan
• The shock of unemployment becomes a pathology in its own right.  ~Robert Farrar Capon, “Being Let Go,” New York Times, 5 August 1984

The Sourcerer would love to add a quote from you to this list…