Daily Inspiration Quote by Viktor Yushchenko

It lands like a slogan because it’s meant to: a statesman’s compression of economic demand into moral claim. “We want work” isn’t just about wages; it’s about dignity as a political right, not a charitable favor. The repetition tightens the screw. First comes the basic need (work), then the qualifier that reveals the real grievance: “honest jobs.” That adjective carries an accusation. Someone, somewhere, has been offering work that isn’t honest - employment stitched to bribery, patronage, oligarchic monopoly, or the quiet humiliation of having to “know someone” to survive.

Yushchenko’s line sits naturally in the post-Soviet drama where a promised market economy often arrived as extraction, not opportunity. In Ukraine’s early-2000s turbulence and the Orange Revolution era, the public hunger wasn’t only for elections that counted, but for a state that stopped acting like a tollbooth. “Our minds and our hands will be our keep!” doubles as a declaration of self-reliance and a rebuke to dependence - on Moscow, on oligarchs, on corrupt bureaucracies, even on nostalgia for Soviet guarantees.

The phrase also threads a needle: it validates white-collar and blue-collar labor in the same breath (“minds” and “hands”), building a broader “we.” It’s rhetoric designed for a crowd that has been told to wait, to be grateful, to accept scraps. Yushchenko answers with a blunt, mobilizing promise: citizenship should pay out in fairness, and the only acceptable currency is work that doesn’t cost you your conscience.