Top 33 Layoffs Quotes & Sayings

There's ups and downs with boxing, layoffs are part of the sport and they can either help or hurt a guy.

But I don't want massive layoffs of anyone - public or private. We are planning on shrinking government through attrition and reform, not through random pink slips.

The Great Depression was going on, so that the station and the streets teemed with homeless people, just as they do today. The newspapers were full of stories of worker layoffs and farm foreclosures and bank failures, just as they are today. All that has changed, in my opinion, is that, thanks to television, we can hide a Great Depression. We may even be hiding a Third World War.

Smart development builds on a region's own skills, resources and local businesses. Dumb growth invites a big corporation in, surrenders control and profits to a distant headquarters, undercuts local manufacturers, and risks layoffs without warning.

I worked as a teacher in the public school system in New York City for several years, and I was a victim of the layoffs, you know, in the mid-'70s. And then I worked as a sales engineer for a company in New Jersey that was selling industrial filtration equipment.

Mass layoffs produce big winners and losers. Most workers who remain are financially unscathed, even though their employer is struggling.

Things are bad in 2001 at Yahoo. There's been layoffs, restructuring, lots of people left.

I avoid long layoffs and I try to stay in shape at all times.

I watch too much cable, I admit. Day after day it gets frustrating. Yesterday I watched as someone called legislation to prevent teacher layoffs a bailout - but I know thats not a view held by many, nor were the views I was frustrated about.

The two words, in the American lexicon, are never good. Pink slip. The first time I ever heard it when I was young was when Kaiser Steel handed out pink slips to many of my neighbors and relatives. Layoffs were about efficiency, sales figures for raw materials or refrigerators.

Most companies that go through layoffs are never the same. They don't recover because trust is broken. And if you're not honest at the point where you're breaking trust anyway, you will never recover.

I call Alibaba '1,001 mistakes.' We expanded too fast, and then in the dot-com bubble, we had to have layoffs. By 2002, we had only enough cash to survive for 18 months. We had a lot of free members using our site, and we didn't know how we'd make money. So we developed a product for China exporters to meet U.S. buyers online. This model saved us.

Today's business and health care climate may not be pleasant. Cutbacks, pay cuts and layoffs do not make anyone's job easy. But that does not mean that the humor need stop.

And let's not forget that internally, we are, like all dying empires, being hollowed out from the inside in terms of infrastructure. I live near Philly, I live in Princeton. The school system is shattered with closings and layoffs. Libraries are being shuttered. Head Start is being cut back. Unemployment benefits are not being extended. You know, we've reached a point of both physical and emotional exhaustion.

One way to reduce the need for layoffs would be to cut back on hours, spreading the available work among more employees.

At my job, my manager had a massive heart attack; we had layoffs. It made me realize that nothing is certain, nothing is for sure, and if I'm going to make a move, I gotta make a move now.

The minute you do any layoffs, you might as well lay off the whole joint because everybody forgets about the customer and worries about their job security.

I see young quarterbacks just coming into the league, and they're throwing screens and layoffs right away. As funny as this might sound, I really learned a lot by going downfield, even in tight coverage.

Globalization has created this interlocking fragility. At no time in the history of the universe has the cancellation of a Christmas order in New York meant layoffs in China.

If you really want to kill morale, have layoffs every two months for the next two years.

A recession is very bad for publicly traded companies, but it's the best time for startups. When you have massive layoffs, there's more competition for available jobs, which means that an entrepreneur can hire freelancers at a lower cost.

Nothing kills your company's culture like layoffs.

I can't tell you how many board meetings I've been in where the CEO is anguished over the impacts on morale that cost cutting or layoffs will bring about. You know what hurts morale even more than cost-cutting and layoffs? Going out of business.

Women in finance bore the brunt of layoffs more than their male counterparts during the Great Recession in 2008 and were also more likely to have been in back office jobs that were replaced by computers.

I believe our schools will actually get better if layoffs are done carefully, such that only the very worst teachers are let go.

Usually when there are a lot of layoffs, like in 2008 and 2009, business creation tends to spike. But that didn't happen right away, partly because people trying to start a business couldn't get credit.

If you have to conduct layoffs, which is always a regrettable thing, there's kind of three things that are very important. One is to communicate well with your employees in order to help them understand why it is you're doing, and how. Second is to make sure that the employees who are part of the go forward, understand kind of what happened and are not like the ground doesn't keep moving. It's like, okay, we did that, we're moving forward, here we go. And then for the employees that you unfortunately have to let go, try to provide as much support for them as possible.

Pension reform can be hard to talk about. In the long run, reform now means fewer demands for layoffs and less draconian measures in the future. It's in the best interest of all Californians to fix this system now.

I think the state has some serious problems. Just look at the layoffs going on across the state, not just in Chicago. It affects the middle class. It pushes people down.

You cannot cheat with the law of conservation of violence: all violence is paid for, and for example, the structural violence exerted by the financial markets, in the form of layoffs, loss of security, etc., is matched sooner or later in the form of suicides, crime and delinquency, drug addiction, alcoholism, a whole host of minor and major everyday acts of violence.

I think threat of change is pretty potent. In humans, blood pressure doesn't go up when people get laid off: it goes up when they first hear rumors that layoffs are coming at the end of the month.

So all of these companies that are going for the big growth, if it continues for any length of time, will outlast their resources and outlast their customers and go belly-up. And that's why these huge companies have massive layoffs all the time.

The obvious liberal rejoinders come to mind: What about the child whose home is hit by a bomb? Did she have some bomb-shaped thoughtform that brought ruin down on her head? And did my [fired white-collar workers] boot-camp mates cause the layoffs that drove them out of their jobs by "vibrating" at a layoff-related frequency? It seems inexcusably cruel to tell people who have reach some kind of personal nadir that their probem is entirely of their own making.