Top 100 Tom Hodgkinson Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I’ve given up email. Well, almost. At the weekend I set up one of those auto-reply messages, informing my correspondents that I would no longer be checking my emails, and that instead they might like to call or write, as we used to in the olden days.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

52. “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.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

53. “Am I the only person in the world who is shocked and amazed at the ongoing flattery of uebergeek Mark Zuckerberg?”

— Tom Hodgkinson

54. “Although I played a lot of computer games in my 20s, now I have children of my own, I hate them with a passion.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

55. “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.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

56. “Beauty feeds us. Anarchy is beauty. We are against the grey people. We want to decorate, like those fantastic Indian lorries which are covered with flowers. Beauty must conquer the lust for order; order is ugliness.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

57. “In a world where you are constantly asked to be ‘committed,’ it is liberating to give yourself the license to be a dilettante. Commit to nothing. Try everything.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

58. “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.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

59. “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.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

60. “If you look at the literature of the 19th century, you get things like Kafka and Dostoevsky, who basically write about feeling bored and alienated. That’s because we lost contact with the important things in life like work that you enjoy, or the garden, nature, your family and friends.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

61. “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.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

62. “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.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

63. “When people say ” I just don’t have enough time ” they mean ” I prioritized something else.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

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

— Tom Hodgkinson

65. “Paradoxically, to be truly idle, you also have to be efficient.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

66. “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.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

67. “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.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

68. “Anxiety suits the status quo very well. Anxious people make good consumers and good workers. Governments and big business, therefore, love terrorism – they adore it, it’s good for business. Anxiety will drive us back into our comfort blankets of credit-card shopping and bad food, so the system deliberately produces anxiety while simultaneously promising to take it away.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

69. “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.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

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

— Tom Hodgkinson

71. “Faffing, of course, does not fit the programme. We are supposed to be busy, productive citizens.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

72. “Idleness allows you to turn a situation from boredom to pleasure.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

73. “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?”

— Tom Hodgkinson

74. “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.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

75. “Alongside my ‘no email’ policy, I resolve to make better use of the wonderful Royal Mail, and send letters and postcards to people. There is a huge pleasure in writing a letter, putting it in an envelope and sticking the stamp on it. And huge pleasure in receiving real letters, too.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

76. “Don’t bother setting up free republics or moving to a country which offers more liberties. Simply declare yourself to be an independent state. Do not involve and coerce others. This is the only way we will effect a proper revolution. Once each of us recognizes our own freedom and our own responsibility, then the chains that bind us will fall away.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

77. “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.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

78. “I’ve never understood activity holidays since we seem to have far too much activity in our daily lives as it is. Find a culture where loafing is the order of the day and where they don’t understand our need to be constantly doing things. Find somewhere you can have a hammock holiday.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

79. “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.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

80. “We have a job. A job! Our reward after years of education! We worked hard in our youth in order to work hard again in our adulthood. A job! The summit of our lives!”

— Tom Hodgkinson

81. “The idea of the “job” as the answer to all woes, individual and social, is one of the most pernicious myths of modern society. It is promoted by politicians, parents, newspaper moralists and leaders of industry, on the left and on the right: paradise, they say, is “full employment.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

82. “We need to be responsible for ourselves; we must create our own republics. Today we hand over our responsibility to the boss, to the company, to government, and then blame them when everything goes wrong.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

83. “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.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

84. “We bore ourselves in order to earn money that we’ll later spend on trying to de-bore ourselves.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

85. “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.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

86. “Being safe is fiction.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

87. “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.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

88. “It’s easier to robe the poor.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

89. “Idleness for me is not a giving up on life but a spirited grabbing hold of it.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

90. “It is precisely to prevent us from thinking too much that society pressurizes us all to get out of bed.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

91. “Often, the things that a lot of work has gone into have been incredibly bad because they’re over-worked.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

92. “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.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

93. “Life is about recapturing lost freedoms...”

— Tom Hodgkinson

94. “Being good to people is the only insurance policy you need.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

95. “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.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

96. “In this age of getting what you want and getting it now, the simple pleasure of browsing is often forgotten.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

97. “Coffee is for winners, go-getters, tea-ignorers, lunch-cancellers, early-risers, guilt-ridden strivers, money obsessives and status-driven spiritually empty lunatics. It is an enervating force. We should resist it and embrace tea, the ancient drink of poets, philosophers and meditators.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

98. “The pedestrian is the highest and most mighty of beings; he walks for pleasure, he observes but does not interfere, he is not in a hurry, he is happy in the company of his own mind, he wanders detached, wise and merry, godlike. He is free.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

99. “You don’t get ads on the Underground saying: “Tired? Then Sleep More,” as no one has figured out how to make money this way.”

— Tom Hodgkinson

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

— Tom Hodgkinson