W.E.B. Du Bois

Work is service, not gain. The object of work is life, not income. The reward of production is plenty, not private fortune. We should measure the prosperity of a nation not by the number of millionaires but by the absence of poverty, the prevalence of health, the efficiency of the public schools, and the number of people who can and do read worthwhile books.

John Stuart Mill

Landlords grow rich in their sleep without working, risking or economizing. The increase in the value of land, arising as it does from the efforts of an entire community, should belong to the community and not to the individual who might hold title.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Do not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000 a day, who has been turning his employees over to the Government relief rolls in order to preserve his company's undistributed reserves, tell you—using his stockholders' money to pay the postage for his personal opinions—that a wage of $11 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry. Fortunately for business as a whole, and therefore for the Nation, that type of executive is a rarity with whom most business executives heartily disagree.
Franklin Roosevelt's Fireside Chat - June 24, 1938

Franklin D. Roosevelt

…no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. …and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.
Franklin Roosevelt's Statement on the National Industrial Recovery Act June 16, 1933

Thomas Jefferson

I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.