Laudator Temporis Acti

Alan Watts (1915-1973), In My Own Way: An Autobiography 1915-1965 (1972; rpt. Novato: New World Library, 2007), p. 37:

It is in the same clock-mad spirit that we are all supposed to "work" from nine to five on such preposterous projects as accounting for what we have done upon billions of square miles of paper derived from devastated forests, frittering away our time upon such dreary gambling games as playing the stock market or selling insurance in drab offices, turning out drillions of lines of chatter for people whose minds cannot be at peace unless perpetually agitated with information and misinformation, and manufacturing, selling, and advertising bizarre, noisome, and pestilential automotive contraptions for taking us all to and from these same projects at the same hours—thereby blocking the roads and jangling our nerves, presumably to give ourselves the message that we really exist and are really important.

Colin Thubron, Journey into Cyprus (New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1976), p. 242 (quoting a Turkish soldier):

"I was four years in England," he said, "in a canning factory at Newton Abbot, twisting a knob day after day — twist, twist, twist. In the end I got fed up and came back home. What sort of life is that for a man — twist, twist, twist?"

William Morris (1836-1894), "Useful Work versus Useless Toil," Collected Works, Vol. XXII: Signs of Change. Lectures on Socialism (London: Longmans Green and Company, 1915), pp. 98-120 (at 118):

For a man to be the whole of his life hopelessly engaged in performing one repulsive and never-ending task, is an arrangement fit enough for the hell imagined by theologians, but scarcely fit for any other form of society.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), "Life Without Principle," Writings, Vol. X: Miscellanies (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1893), pp. 253-287 (at 256):

Most men would be insulted, if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.