Paul Lafargue

Jehovah … gave his worshippers the supreme example of ideal laziness; after six days of work, he rests for all eternity.

Paul Lafargue (January 15, 1842 – November 26, 1911) was a French revolutionary Marxist socialist journalist, literary critic, political writer and activist; he was Karl Marx's son-in-law, having married his second daughter Laura Marx.

Quotes

• When, in our civilized Europe, we would find a trace of the native beauty of man, we must go seek it in the nations where economic prejudices have not yet uprooted the hatred of work. … The Greeks in their era of greatness had only contempt for work: their slaves alone were permitted to labor: the free man knew only exercises for the body and mind. … The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods.
  • The Right to Be Lazy (1883), H. Kerr, trans. (1907), pp. 11-12

• Jehovah … gave his worshippers the supreme example of ideal laziness; after six days of work, he rests for all eternity.
  • The Right to Be Lazy (1883), H. Kerr, trans. (1907), pp. 12-13

• Philanthropy means to steal wholesale, and give away retail.
  • The Religion of Capital (1887), New York Labor News (1918), p. 22

• The blood of three oppressed races runs in my veins.
  • As quoted in Derfler, Leslie (1991). Paul Lafargue and the Founding of French Marxism, 1842-1882. Harvard University Press. p. 11. 

• I am proudest of my Negro extraction.
  • As quoted in Derfler, Leslie (1991). Paul Lafargue and the Founding of French Marxism, 1842-1882. Harvard University Press. p. 15.