List of Tom Hodgkinson Quotes

I've Found That There Isn't Any Correlation Whatsoever Between The Hours Put In And The Quality Of What Comes Out. Most Of The Beatles' Songs Probably Originated In About Five Minutes.

I Don't Put Much Faith In The Political System Because It's A Question Of How Are You Going To Run Capitalism, Not How Are We Going To Develop A Different System To Capitalism.

The Way To Stop Feeling Guilty Is To Read Stuff - I'm Not Saying My Book, But Works By Bertrand Russell Or Oscar Wilde, People Who Weren't Losers But Who Didn't Believe In The Work Ethic, And Argued This Thing About Guilt Or Wrote Philosophy About Idleness.

There Are A Lot Of Little Tricks You Can Do To Inject A Bit More Time Into The Day. Most Important Is Limiting Yourself To A 40 Hour Week, Not Working 50 Hours Or 60 Or 70. It's Just Crazy. It's Actually Irresponsible To You And Irresponsible To Your Family And Friends. Why Should Your Employer's Profits Be More Important Than Your Own Family? You're Not Even Going To Get Any Of The Profits - All You Get Is Not Losing Your Job. It's A Very Negative System.

I Think It's Good To Look At How People Lived Before, And Then Take The Best Bits Of That Culture And Try To Mix It In With Your Own.

What Seems Extraordinary Is That The Richest Countries In The World, In Terms Of Economic Output, Are The Ones Where We Work Hardest. You Would Have Thought That The End Of All This Innovation, Technological Advancement, And Financial Wizardry Should Be To Create Less Work, Not More Of It.

Benjamin Franklin And The Whole Idea Of A New Attitude To Money: "time Is Money." He Invented That Idea. Before That, Time Wasn't Money In The Same Way; In The Medieval Age It Was Regarded As Sinful For Money To Be The Object Of Your Life.

I Like The Idea Of Becoming [fairly] Good At Lots Of Things Rather Than Very Good At Just One Thing. So It Would Be Nice To Be Okay At The Guitar Or At The Piano, A Reasonable Cook, Perhaps Able To Fix Your Car Or Do Some Basic Carpentry, And Be Able To Write The Odd Article. Rather Than Being Super Good At One Tiny Thing, To Be Kind Of Average At Lots Of Things. It Might Mean That You Have A More Kind Of Enjoyable, Complete Life.

What I've Found In Working Less Is You Start To Get A Bit More Involved In The More Real Politics, Which Is Local Politics That Affect What's Going On In Your Own Community.

The Best Thing That Can Happen To Anybody Is To Be Sacked Or Made Redundant Because Often That's When You Think, "i Don't Want To Become One Of The Living Dead. I Haven't Got Anything To Lose, Now I Can Start To Follow My Own Dreams."

A Conclusion I’ve Come To At The Idler Is That It Starts With Retreating From Work But It’s Really About Making Work Into Something That Isn’t Drudgery And Slavery, And Then Work And Life Can Become One Thing.

Deleting 200 Spams A Day Is A Drag. And I Was Checking My Email Constantly, Rather Than Getting On With My Real Work, Which Is Reading And Writing. Email Was Becoming A Distraction, A Burden Rather Than A Liberation.