Best 99 quotes of Tom Hodgkinson on MyQuotes

Management gurus in general are, I think, best avoided. All too often they reduce your working life to a list of rules to be followed. Targets are aimed at. Goals kicked at. You then break the rules or forget them and, hey presto, you start beating yourself up.

Meetings, clearly, can take place anywhere, and wouldn't it be nice to see your coworkers lounging on the grass with their shoes off?

My hope is that flexible working and varying shift patterns will give workers a taste for idling and that they will gradually demand greater reductions in the length of the working week.

My idea of childcare at festivals is to sit at a trestle table with an ale while the kids run around and make up their own games.

One aspect of fast London life I have never understood, for example, is the custom of the gym. Why do people go to gyms?

One of the least arduous but most productive of gardening jobs, the magic of deadheading never fails to delight me. It was a revelation when the principle was explained to me: that flowers are the attempt by the plant to reproduce itself. So if you cut the heads off before the flower turns into seeds, the plant will continue to flower.

Our dreams take us into other worlds, alternative realities that help us make sense of day-to-day realities.

Pain will never leave us. Instead of putting energy into destroying pain, we need to put energy into creating pleasure.

Part of this individualism is you feel this pressure that you alone have to conquer the world, and if you don't work all the hours God gives then you start feeling really guilty. If you can stop feeling guilty, then I think it's easier to start doing what you want to do.

Punk was a protest against work and against boredom. It was a sign of life, a rant, a scream, a rejection of bourgeois morals. But have things improved since then? Arguably, they've got worse.

Self-importance is a trap, because the moment we start to think that we actually matter is the moment when things start to go wrong. The truth is that you are supremely unimportant and nothing matters. All of man's striving is for nothing; all effort is wasted. To realize that everything is meaningless is tremendously liberating, since it then leaves us completely free to create our own lives and ignore the plans that others have for us.

Sensible people advise against drinking on an empty stomach, but to my mind it is the best sort of drinking.

Surely, anyway, a working day of eight or nine hours which is not split by a nap is simply too much for a human being to take, day in, day out, and particularly so in hot weather.

The accusation 'unprofessional' means 'You did not behave like a machine today.

The art of living is the art of bringing dreams and reality together.

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.

The idea of a government is to create an ordered, willing work force where there's no trouble. I think idlers are generally seen as potentially dangerous because they're asking questions.

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.

The reason laziness is rarely pushed as a lifestyle option is down to one simple reason: money. There are fortunes to be made out of active lifestyles. Gyms charge fees. But no one is going to make money out of sleep. It is free.

There is nothing so perfect as pinball and a pint at 11 a.m.

There's nothing new about anti-work philosophy. History is dotted with individuals and groups who decided that laziness was next to godliness and work was a waste of time.

These days we seem more bound to our bosses than ever before. We even identify our own selves with the jobs we do: "What do you do?" is the first question we ask each other at parties, as if a job title could express a fundamental truth about our personality.

The siesta provides a delightful detour from the working day and it also has a practical value as far as productivity is concerned. Winston Churchill had a good long siesta every day during the second world war and he said it was the thing that enabled him to cope with the pressure.

The terrible thing about the internet and Amazon is that they take the magic and happy chaos out of book shopping. The internet might give you what you want, but it won't give you what you need.

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.

The world's richest half billion people - that's about seven per cent of the global population - are responsible for fifty per cent of the world's emissions.

To me there is no more depressing sight than a five-year-old staring at a screen, unsmiling, mouse in hand. Besides whatever dreadful things this prolonged exposure to screens is doing to their brains, computer games tend to be solitary affairs, and produce little laughter.

We bore ourselves in order to earn money that we'll later spend on trying to de-bore ourselves

We have an idea that if something we're doing isn't actually earning money, or spending it, then it's completely worthless. But if you start to work less, you can actually start to give more to society, but on a local level.

We have become so obsessed by numbers and by bottom lines that beauty and truth has been knocked aside.

We have to wonder whether digital technology, rather than making it easier to communicate, is actually doing the opposite. We now sit alone at a keyboard, firing off zeros and ones into the ether. Offices are silent.

We need to claim lunch back. It is our natural right. It has been stolen from us by our rulers. The fear that keeps you chained to your desk, staring at your screen, does not serve your spirit. Lunch is a time to forget about being sensible, practical, efficient. A proper lunch should be spiritually as well as physically nourishing. Cosy, convivial, a treat; lunch is for loafers.

...[W]e should be mucking about all the time, because mucking about is enjoying life for its own sake, now, and not in preparation for an imaginary future. It's obvious that the mirth-filled man, the cheerful soul, the childish adult is the one who has least to fear from life.

We think we have to work because the advertising industry has elevated wants into needs. The newspapers and the television batter us incessantly with the latest "must-haves", whether that's shoes, videogames or patio heaters. As a result, mums think they "have" to work at Tesco in order to buy expensive trainers.

What is required as we travel towards full unemployment is not new legislation but a gradual change of mental attitude, a shift in values. As our taste for idling grows, we will refuse to work for old-fashioned bosses who demand a five-day, 40-hour, nine-to-five type week, or worse.

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.

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.

When people say " I just don't have enough time " they mean " I prioritized something else.

When stuck years ago in a job I hated, my only friend was the public bench. As the tedious mornings dragged on, how I would long for the lunch hour, when I would be able to escape the torture of the office and stroll over to the churchyard and into the comforting wooden embrace of one of its benches.

When the going gets tough, the tough take a nap.

When walking you see things that you miss in a motor car or on the train. You give your mind space to ponder.

When you go for a walk, take seeds with you, poppies, rainbow chard, rocket. Plant them among the weeds in patches of wasteland. See what happens.

Working is bad enough in the winter, but in the summer it can become completely intolerable. Stuck in airless offices, every fibre of our being seems to cry out for freedom. We're reminded of being stuck in double maths while the birds sing outside.

Writing a book is a brilliant thing because once you've finished it, you've done it, and there's the potential for it to go on earning you a living without you doing any more work on it. It's absolutely ideal for an idler.

A diet of solely mental work is suffocating.

Boredom is the very opposite of beauty and truth. Life has been sacrificed to profit, and the result is boredom on a massive scale.

Career is just posh slavery.

Screens make us into passive receivers. Smash the screen and find a pencil and a piece of paper instead.

Therefore, the idle parent who wants to stop the whining needs to stop whining himself, and one way is to resist the call to work ever longer and harder hours. Throw your BlackBerry into the river. Unslave yourself. Hard work will not lead to health and happiness. Just ask yourself: would you rather spend your child's first few years playing with them or working for the mega-corp in order to make them profits and you money to buy ribbish you don't need in order to dull the pain of overwork?