Tom Hodgkinson Quotes

• When we are busy at work and busy at home, an hour’s walking every day becomes a real luxury. If done alone, the walk injects a period of meditation into the day, and if done in company, it allows space for some really good conversation.

  Tom Hodgkinson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Every Day, Walking

• 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.

  Tom Hodgkinson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Industry, Incessantly

• We no longer sing and dance. We don’t know how to. Instead, we watch other people sing and dance on the television screen. Christmas, which was once a festival of active enjoyment, has turned into a binge of purely passive pleasures.

  Tom Hodgkinson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Festival, Dance

• We can live frugally. The less you work, the less you spend and the more time you have for loafing about. But when I put forward this simple notion, I was greeted with a volley of resentment.

  Tom Hodgkinson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Resentment, Forward

• Truly, the bench is a boon to idlers. Whoever first came up with the idea is a genius: free public resting places where you can take time out from the bustle and brouhaha of the city, and simply sit and watch and reflect.

  Tom Hodgkinson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Whoever, Simply

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Parties, Selves

• 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.

  Tom Hodgkinson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Delightful, Provides

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Weather, Split

• 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.

  Tom Hodgkinson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Punk, Worse

• Once you explore life outside of work, it becomes addictive. The less you work, the less you want to work. At first, the odd afternoon off seems like a fantastic luxury. Before long, you are opting for a four-day week. Then a four-day week becomes an intolerable demand on your time, so you find a way of moving to a three-day week.

  Tom Hodgkinson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Afternoon, Addictive

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Followed, Kicked

• It’s pretty obvious that Western lifestyles which rely on gigantic amounts of electricity use up far more resources than a subsistence-based life. A little more poverty would be a good thing.

  Tom Hodgkinson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Rely, Electricity

• Indolence, of course, is an absolutely crucial part of the creative process: you do not find poets sitting in rows in cavernous word factories, staring at screens. They are rather to be found lolling on the sofa or strolling through the groves, nursing their melancholic temperaments and losing themselves in extended reveries.

  Tom Hodgkinson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Rather, Crucial

• In both word and deed, one of the greatest idlers of all time was John Lennon. In his songs we see repeated defences of simply lying around doing nothing.

  Tom Hodgkinson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Both, Simply

• If your work is done on the phone, then surely you can set up some kind of wireless system. If your work involves reading or writing reports, then this too could be done outside.

  Tom Hodgkinson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Involves, Writing

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Garden, Alienated

• I’ve often said that far more sensible than a ‘make poverty history’ campaign would be a ‘make wealth history’ campaign. It is, after all, the wealthy people who do all the damage. The less money you earn, the fewer resources you use up.

  Tom Hodgkinson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Damage, Resources

• I’m not sure if I could bear to go on an aeroplane again. It’s not my concern for the welfare of the planet. It’s not even the long check-in times and queuing. No, it’s the humiliation of the security process that has finally done it for me.

  Tom Hodgkinson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Concern, Sure

• I originally welcomed the mobile phone, as it seemed to me that it would enable you to work from anywhere. On the mobile, who was to know if you were sitting on the branch of a tree or sitting in an office? But it instead had the opposite effect: instead of freeing us from the office, it allowed the office to take away our freedom.

  Tom Hodgkinson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Enable, Branch

• For a really relaxing time, you want to go to a place where the work ethic hasn’t taken hold, where the culture hasn’t been taken over by the western values of constant striving.

  Tom Hodgkinson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Striving, Western

Tom Hodgkinson (77)

Birth:	1968
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Author, Editor, Journalist, Writer

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