"Workingman" Quotes from Famous Books
... Christian pulpit are bad converters; their eloquent appeals may captivate the imagination and lead a few men of the world to the foot of the altar, but these results are not more brilliant than ephemeral. But let a peasant or a workingman speak to those whom he meets a few simple words going directly to the conscience, and the man ... — Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... past-master in the art of putting a humble witness at his ease, and very soon, in the privacy of Godfrey Staunton's abandoned room, he had extracted all that the porter had to tell. The visitor of the night before was not a gentleman, neither was he a workingman. He was simply what the porter described as a "medium-looking chap," a man of fifty, beard grizzled, pale face, quietly dressed. He seemed himself to be agitated. The porter had observed his hand trembling when he had held out the note. ... — The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the bones and cemented with the blood of those whose part in all its pomp is that and nothing more. It cannot be reared in the generous tropics, for there the people will not contribute their blood and bones. The proposition that the average American workingman or European peasant is "better off" than the South Sea Islander, lolling under a palm and drunk with over-eating, will ... — The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... follows: "I defy you to lay a Hand on me. I am the Stand-By of the Comic Artist and the Star Attraction of the Colored Supplement. When I pull the Step-Ladder from under some Honest Workingman, causing him to break his Leg, or hit a Stout Lady in the Eye with a Brick, please remember that I am bringing Sunshine into thousands of Homes. As I go on my way, committing Arson, Mayhem, and Assault, with Intent ... — Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... great railroad corporation, in the very middle of a growling fit over the extra cost involved in purchasing his last Legislature, (owing to the fact that some of its Members had been elected upon a fusion of Radical-Reform and Honest-Workingman's Tickets,) is suddenly and mysteriously impressed with the recollection that this is Christmas Eve. "Why, bless my soul, so it is!" he cries, springing up from his littered rosewood desk like a boy. "Here, you ... — Punchinello Vol. 1, No. 21, August 20, 1870 • Various
... upon one side the class of skilled labor, a large proportion of our wage-workers are notoriously inefficient. In the most common tasks one has to watch the average workingman in order to prevent his bungling a job. Hands are worth little without some brains; as in the work done, so in the pay won. Our labor is quite as largely uninterested—having no more heart than brains back of the hands. Work is done mechanically by most workingmen, with ... — Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... syndicalism and anarchism. It is not my fault if anarchism and syndicalism have the same ends in view. The former pursues the integral emancipation of the individual; the latter the integral emancipation of the workingman. I find the whole of syndicalism in anarchism."[17] When we leave the theories of syndicalism to study its methods, we find them identical with those of the anarchists. The general strike is, after all, exactly the same method that Bakounin ... — Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... whole story," said the man, with a voice trembling with profound grief. "I am a workingman, and I came to Paris more than twenty years ago with a fellow-countryman, a companion from childhood. We robbed birds'-nests, and we learned to read in school together—almost a brother, sir. He was called Philip; I am called Jack, myself. He was a fine big fellow; I have ... — Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... certain, respectable hotel. It was situated somewhat aloof from my former track in life; my present mood inclining me to avoid most of my old companions, from whom I was now sundered by other interests, and who would have been likely enough to amuse themselves at the expense of the amateur workingman. The hotel-keeper put me into a back room of the third story of his spacious establishment. The day was lowering, with occasional gusts of rain, and an ugly tempered east wind, which seemed to come right off the chill and melancholy sea, hardly mitigated by sweeping over ... — The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... supersede almost all other methods of conveyance in this country—when mail coaches will go by railway, and railroads will become the great highway for the King and all his subjects. The time is coming when it will be cheaper for a workingman to travel upon a railway than to walk on foot. I know there are great and almost unsurmountable difficulties to be encountered, but what I have said will come to pass as sure as you live. I only wish I may ... — Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... colored. "A lot father knows about Ross as he really is," said he. "Oh, he's clever about what he lets father see. However, you do admit there's some other ideal of man than successful workingman." ... — The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... a war of races, nor of sections, nor of political parties, but a war of Principles; a war upon the working-classes, whether white or black; a war against Man, the world over. In this war, the black man was the first victim; the workingman of whatever color the next; and now all who contend for the rights of labor, for free speech, free schools, free suffrage, and a free government, securing to all life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, are driven to do battle in defense ... — History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... merely a representative case. He was by no means the only workingman who that morning kept his bed warm to an unaccustomed hour. Except such as had farms of their own to work on, or work for themselves to do, there was scarcely any one in Stockbridge who went to work. A large part of the labor by which the industries of the community had been carried on, ... — The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... to it fast enough. And when I do you'll see if you can safely insult the representative of the mighty power of the honest workingman ... — Calumet "K" • Samuel Merwin and Henry Kitchell Webster
... the lover who would some time come, a tall fair young man, a rich man owning houses and lands. The workingman who walked beside her had nothing to do with her conception of love. She walked with him, stayed at the office until the others had gone to walk unobserved with him because of his eyes, because of the eager thing in his eyes that was at the same time humble, that bowed ... — Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... good humor. His round, florid face was free from lines, his gray eyes were clear and friendly. He had thick, brown hair, a short, yellowish mustache, and a close-cut, brownish beard. He was dressed like a superior workingman, in a flannel shirt, a rough, blue suit, oil-stained and dust-sprinkled, and he wore thick-soled boots. His hands were strong and red and not too clean, with several broken nails and calloused places. In a word, he looked the wood carver, every inch of him, and the detective ... — Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... papers said, poor service, shabby cars, no seats at rush-hours, no universal transfers (as a matter of fact, there were in operation three hundred and sixty-two separate transfer points) and no adequate tax on the immense sums earned. The workingman who read this by gas or lamp light in the kitchen or parlor of his shabby flat or cottage, and who read also in other sections of his paper of the free, reckless, glorious lives of the rich, felt himself to be defrauded of a portion of his rightful inheritance. ... — The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... a chance with the owner of the means of production, who, together with the economic power, enjoyed the protection of the State with its various weapons of warfare and coercion. In the face of such a giant master all the appeals of the workingman to the love of justice and common ... — Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... in their dirty clothes, smelling of grease and dye, drank beer, played a few games, and harangued each other, and went home maudlin or stupefied. Perhaps it was more comfortable than the slatternly wives and crying children. Did it need to be so? If you gave the workingman a helping hand, did he turn straightway ... — Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... a place where any line of blue mist softly linked tree to tree upon the horizon. For a moment she thought she saw in his face, bent now over the fire, the features of that original man whom we still recall every now and then, although we know only the clerk, barrister, Governmental official, or workingman variety of him. Not that Mr. Basnett, giving his days to commerce and his spare time to social reform, would long carry about him any trace of his possibilities of completeness; but, for the moment, in his youth and ardor, still speculative, still uncramped, one might imagine him the citizen ... — Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... have imported, with our labor, their discontent, and the theories which are founded upon it to obtain the price. But the American workingman is a sensible fellow, when he can have the chance to think without being overwhelmed by fear, and he will realize that his betterment in a material way must come through his own individual growth and the growth of the conscience of the people who believe in a square deal. The ... — The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... remuneration as he pleases. Thus, if he lives sparingly, saves money, and invests his savings, for greater security, in land, the land in such a case is only his wages in another form; and, consequently, a workingman's little estate thus purchased should be as completely at his own disposal as the wages ... — The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... may win!" he said, bitterly. "And what then, Harry? Strikes are for them that can afford them, Harry—they're no for workingman wi' a wife that's sick on his hands and a wean that's dyin' for lack o' the proper food. Gie'en my wife and my bairn should dee, what good would it be to me ... — Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder
... experience in missions and mission churches, I would find it very hard if I were a workingman living in a tenement not to be antagonistic to them; for, in large measure, such work is done on the assumption that people are poor and degraded through laxity in morals. The scheme of salvation is a salvation for the individual; ... — From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... hope to get it in time," he said. "Did it ever strike you that though we think ourselves jolly clever, that there are heaps of things which a workingman—the men we look down upon—can do which we couldn't accomplish if it were to save our lives. For instance, I couldn't make a horseshoe if my existence depended upon it, and yet it looks ... — At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... have put into the thing done or the thing made; who live by doing or making a thing, and not by marketing a thing after some other man has done it or made it. The quality of the thing has nothing to do with the economic nature of the case; the author is, in the last analysis, merely a workingman, and is under the rule that governs the workingman's life. If he is sick or sad, and cannot work, if he is lazy or tipsy and will not, then he earns nothing. He cannot delegate his business to a clerk ... — Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Frenchman is rude, his impoliteness is worse than that of other nations, because he knows better: he is rude with malice prepense. The lower classes have especially lost much of their courtesy since the Commune. I have seen a French workingman thrust a lady violently aside on a crowded sidewalk, with a scowl and a muttered curse that lent significance to the act. And the graceful, suave courtesy of the shopkeepers—how swiftly it flies out of the window when their hope of profit in the shape ... — Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... the game with it since I can remember. You can't tell me anything I don't know about the lowest, poorest side of it. Oh I could tell you things that would make your head swim. If you want your boy dosed just sick as a horse on what a workingman gets in Multiopolis 'tween Sunrise Alley and Biddle Boulevard, just you turn him over to me a week. I'll fix him. I'll make the creamery job look like 'Lijah charioteering for the angels to him, honest I will lady; and he won't ever know ... — Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... exhausted, to be welcomed and regaled not so much with hot tea and loving words as by wailing infants and complaining women,—Mart being, as usual, away at some soul-stirring meeting, where much was said about the wrongs of the workingman, but nothing thought of those ... — A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... can't think of it without its antithesis, the home of the workingman and the hut of the poor negro," ... — A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... with certain large industrial plants or groups of plants signally demonstrated an effort to reinstate skill as a distinction of those who had acquired it. The pioneer work of such educators as Dr. Felix Adler in the Ethical Culture School of New York, at first called the Workingman's School, to introduce manual training and some definite use of handicraft processes for educational purposes in the grade schools, and thus make a logical connection with the Kindergarten, was a striking example of the ... — The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... with Robert's help. The present owner had made a fortune by it, and after thirty years of business he was thinking of retiring to one of the ornamental cottages in the outskirts of the city, a usual retreat for the frugal and successful workingman. Michael had not indeed the 2,000 francs which must be paid down; but perhaps he could have persuaded Master Benoit to wait. Robert's presence would have been a security for him, for the young man could not fail to insure the prosperity of a workshop; ... — Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... said. And then he told me. I don't know if you will believe it; it seems too much of a drama to be credible to me, if I had not heard Robert Halarkenden tell it in his entirely simple way, sitting in his workingman's blouse, with the big clippers in his right hand. Thirty years before he had been laird of a small property in Scotland, and about to marry the girl whom he cared for. Then suddenly he found that she was ... — August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... the public pressed for solution as never before. The only suggestion at first discussed was arbitration. Enforced arbitration could not be effected in the absence of contract without infringing the workingman's right to labor or to decline to do so; in other words, without reducing him, in case of adverse decision by arbitration, to a condition of involuntary servitude. It looked as though no solution would be reached unless State or nation should condemn and acquire ample portions ... — History of the United States, Volume 6 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... placards and wood-cuts from newspapers or advertisements. Evidently the eldest boy, the owner of the school-books stacked in a corner, was left in charge while his parents were absent at the theatre. In many a French workingman's family, so soon as a child reaches the age of six or seven, it plays the part of mother to ... — Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... of bringing me a singular windfall. This was at the end of the season, after the "Grand Farewell Fancy Dress Gala." Many of the hampers had suffered severely; and it was judged wiser to save storage, dispose of them, and lay in a fresh stock when the campaign re-opened. Among my purchasers was a workingman of the name of Speedy, to whose house, after several unavailing letters, I must proceed in person, wondering to find myself once again on the wrong side, and playing the creditor to some one else's debtor. Speedy was in the belligerent stage of fear. ... — The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... no, doubt, is the establishment of a municipal art gallery in the civic center, the only ideal place for it, where the workingman from the Mission and the merchant from west of Van Ness avenue will find it equally convenient of access. If a smaller number of citizens could raise the money for a municipal opera house, there should be no trouble in getting funds for a building devoted ... — The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... true, it was also a fact that an American workingman could not live and support his family on the wages a Chinaman would take; and when the white man saw the Chinese given the jobs because they could work cheaply, he became discouraged and angry. Was he to be denied a living in his own country because of these strangers? ... — History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... billion and a half, or five dollars for every one that it represents, and the interests and dividends which have been promptly paid year by year have come from the toil and the sweat and the life of the American workingman. (Applause). And nobody interferes with the Steel Trust; at least, nobody but the direct action men. (Laughter and applause). The courts are silent, the states' attorneys are silent; the governors ... — Industrial Conspiracies • Clarence S. Darrow
... possible that the farmers and the promoters of the great mining and manufacturing enterprises which have recently been established in the South may yet find that the free ballot of the workingman, without distinction of race, is needed for their defense as well as for his own? I do not doubt that if those men in the South who now accept the tariff views of Clay and the constitutional expositions of Webster would courageously ... — United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... Humbug, between the Almighty and General Butler. God said let there be light and there was light. General Butler says let there be money and there is—rags. This is the first time in our history that the American workingman has been gravely asked to take for his wages money it costs nothing to make, that it is no loss to lose, that it is no gain to get, and that even a Chinaman won't touch." Butler was very angry and answered, rather irrelevantly, as it seemed to me, by saying that I did not ... — Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... known and danced with, in those distant university days when his future seemed assured, and life a joyous conquest with all the odds in his favor. Now she was of another world, for he was, after all, but a workingman, while she, the daughter of a millionaire lumberman, would dance and associate with those other university men whose financial incomes enabled them to dawdle as they pleased through life. He had no bitterness in this summary, but he sustained an instant's longing for a taste of that old existence, ... — The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... the elements from which it is sought to devise a scheme by which, without unfavorably changing the condition of the workingman, our merchant marine shall be raised from its enfeebled condition and new markets provided for the sale beyond our borders of the manifold fruits of our ... — A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 8: Chester A. Arthur • James D. Richardson
... saw in the days preceding civil strife that the workingman of the North could ill afford to compete with slave labor at the South. Permit me to say to you that the half-slave, the political slave, made timid by an environment that tends to crush his spirit and dwarf his energies, is a menace ... — The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... surrounded by little gardens of vegetables and flowers. Here the city workman spends Sunday and often the twilight hours and the night in summer time. Of course, these are possible only in a country where the workingman is in a distinct social class and where he is compelled to be content with the amusements and occupations ... — Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... elbows. Evidently she was the boy of the family and to her fell the duty of performing the innumerable chores of the ranch, for her hands were thick with work and the tips of the fingers blunted. Also she had that calm, self-satisfied eye which belongs to the workingman who knows that he has earned ... — Trailin'! • Max Brand
... off what would otherwise be a fairly good face. Cover mouth and chin and one will say that he has the strong face of the ordinary American workingman. His lips, for the most part, are closed, but in an irregular line, giving the idea that his jaws are ... — The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... impossible that a workingman who stands upon a metropolitan street corner and observes this Bacchanalian revel and prodigality of expense, should not be embittered by a sense of the inequality of the conditions of life. But this is not the most mischievous effect of ... — Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... thirty others scattered over the country, all holding property in common, working on a basis of mutual helpfulness, aiming at a nobler life and a better system of labor than that which now separates the capitalist and the workingman. ... — Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... WORKINGMAN who has been beaten. The English workmen did not sell the English mercantile navy to J.P. Morgan. ... — Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... are industrious, we shall never starve; for, at the workingman's house hunger looks in, but dares not enter. Nor will the bailiff or the constable enter, for industry pays ... — Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... hands, her fair, pale complexion, the graceful turn of her head, her studiously low-pitched voice, the something un-material that pervaded her whole person, her eyes, whose glance could be so cold, so disdainful; and, on the other hand, I saw my father with his robust, workingman's frame, his hearty laugh when he allowed himself to be merry, the professional, utilitarian, in fact, plebeian, aspect of him, in his ideas and ways, his gestures and his discourse. But the plebeian was so noble, so lofty in his generosity, in his deep feeling. ... — Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... trailblazing enterprise of Volume One for Volume Two's electric unrest. In Volume One our wagon was hitched to the star of liberty. Capital and labor have cut the traces. The labor union forbids the workingman to labor as his own virile energy and skill prompt him. If he disobeys, he is expelled and called a 'scab.' Don't let us call ourselves the land of the free while such things go on. We're all thinking a deal too much about our pockets nowadays. ... — Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... spoke impressively, "as things stand now, if one workingman thinks he ought to have more pay he goes to the company and asks for it. The company says no. If he gets troublesome, they fire him. If one man works in a close breast with foul air the company tells him to go back to his work or quit. It costs money to timber bad ground. One poor workman's ... — Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... wouldn't this be a paradise for the English workingman?" said Deppingham. "That's the kind of a day's labor they'd like. Do you mean to say that these fellows trudge eight miles to work every morning ... — The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... the British workingman has gone in for political action and will have a try at that before he listens to the Anarchists. Slow of thought and used to compromise, he is a stern taskmaker and will exact a rigid account of the stewardship ... — Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... not hear from the lips of the Irish workingman, even in Dublin, any of the affirmations and rejections which have long since become the commonplaces of his comrades in other lands. But on the subject of Irish freedom his views are instantly forthcoming, and his desires are explicit, and, to a degree, ... — The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... Foolish, I know, for a workingman to have an ideal,—the Anarchist paper published ... — Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... can't associate with them in one thing if not in all, Mr. Workingman," rejoined the Irishman, sneeringly, "and so, if you won't drink with us, you can't become ... — The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... in a fever of eagerness and impatience for the arrival of this man whom I idealised and looked on as a great man ... the man who had written the Les Miserables of the American workingman. ... — Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... rather than a rural population. Instead of Hayslope and Raveloe, Mrs. Poyser and Silas Marner, we have Middlemarch and Treby Magna, Dorothea Brooke and Felix Holt. If Felix Holt is quite as much a working-man as Adam Bede, occupying a social position higher in no respect whatever, yet he is a workingman of a far different type. If Adam is the nobler character, the truer type of man, Felix represents a larger social purpose and has higher moral aims. In Adam Bede, we find rustic simplicity and contentment, but in Felix Holt we touch social aspirations and political ambitions. The ... — George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... by the force of his honest utterances and sound reasoning. At the same time he has risen to the heights of eloquence upon the floor of the Board of Aldermen when defending the cause of the laboring man. Himself a workingman all his life, he never allows those who earn their bread by the sweat of their brow to ask him twice for a favor which it is in his power to grant. He has been their unsolicited champion when they badly needed one, and his record will bear the ... — The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various
... leader of this strike—take this down, Mr. Stenographer, there—I'll say it slowly; I, as the leader of this movement of the Democracy of Labor, as the preacher preaching the era of good will and comradeship all over the earth, bid you, my fellow-workers, meet to preach Christ's workingman's gospel wherever you can hire a hall or rent a lot, to parade your own streets, and to bare your heads to clubs and your breasts to bullets if need be to restore in this district the right of trial by jury in times of peace. And now,"—the crowd roared its approval. ... — In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... The Northern workingman, with steam and electricity bringing North and South into closer and closer touch, answered this cry of fear from the South ... — The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... professional man is scarcely equipped and started in his profession before he is thirty. A business man, if he is on the road to success, is much nearer prosperity at thirty-five than twenty-five, and it is therefore wise for these men not to marry in the twenties; but this does not apply to the workingman. In many trades he is laid upon the shelf at thirty-five, and in nearly all trades he receives the largest wages in his life between twenty and thirty. If the young workingman has all his wages to himself, he will probably establish habits ... — Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... something. His features are large and rough-hewn, and his cheeks and chin are covered with a soft light down. When agitated or angry, he turns gray as dust, his movements become quick and agile, and his stoop disappears. He wears the blouse and boots of a workingman. ... — Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... "He is filthy." You should say, "He has on his garments the signs, the traces, of his toil." Remember this. And you must love the little mason, first, because he is your comrade; and next, because he is the son of a workingman. ... — Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... agencies for improving the condition of the poor. With him battled men who had given lives of patient study and effort to the cause of helping their fellow-men. Shoulder to shoulder with them stood the thoughtful workingman from the East Side tenement. The slum, too, marshalled its forces. Tammany produced its notes. It pointed to the increased tax rate, showed what it had cost to build schools and parks and to clean house, and called it criminal recklessness. The issue was made sharp and ... — The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... circumstance," continued the Bishop, "that pleases me to remember occurred in Glasgow five weeks ago. I saw a crowd entering a large church, and I asked a workingman, who was eating his lunch outside the building, the name of the church; and he answered,—'It's just the auld Ram's Horn Kirk. They are putting a new minister in the pulpit today and they seem weel ... — An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... relating to revenue, currency, corporations, police regulations. The settlement of the intricate problem and of that immensely important one, will not be added to by flagrant assaults on public authority, nor by the interference by bodies or individuals with the free right of every single workingman to work for whatever he pleases and for whomever he pleases and as many hours as he pleases; nor by the confiscation of real or personal property. And on the other hand that question will not be solved ... — Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various |