"Hand to mouth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Capitalism"—that is to say, by a peculiar social organisation in which the two main factors are a small body of rich capitalists and manufacturers and an enormous pauper proletariat living from hand to mouth, at the mercy of the heartless employers of labour. Russia has lately followed in the footsteps of those wealthy countries, and if she continues to do so she will inevitably be saddled with the same ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... afraid was she that she had tried to keep Ranny from ever seeing Violet. Time and again she had hurried her away when she had seen Ranny coming, while the fear in her heart told her that those two were bound to meet. She had lived from hand to mouth on her precarious happiness, contented if she could stave off the ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... Troy, angrily. "There she is with plenty of money, and a house and farm, and horses, and comfort, and here am I living from hand to mouth—a needy adventurer. Besides, it is no use talking now; it is too late, and I am glad of it; I've been seen and recognized here this very afternoon. I should have gone back to her the day after the fair, if it hadn't been for ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... dealing him a mortal blow whilst appearing to strike the Jesuits; he stood out a long while, leaving the quarrel to become embittered and public opinion to wax wroth at his indecision. "There is a hand to mouth administration," said an anonymous letter addressed to the king and Madame de Pompadour, "but there is no longer any hope of government. A time will come when the people's eyes will be opened, and peradventure that time ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... for a long time. I have closely studied the question of economics, and have long ago come to the conclusion that the person of medium income is the only person who is truly happy. I am even inclined to believe that living from hand to mouth is the most enviable state of existence. You never know how the cards will turn up; but the excitement is intense. When I am a doctor, I shall watch people's faces with intense interest, wondering whether, when their next illness ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... Forestier would not give way. Ingres' persistence looked like folly, even madness in his eyes. The young man was with difficulty living from hand to mouth, portraits and small orders barely keeping the wolf from the door. The return home and marriage would ensure his future materially and socially, and up to a certain point render him independent of malevolent ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... dictatorship, found it impossible to secure the proper resumption of the provincial remittances. Fresh loans became more and more sought after; by means of forced domestic issues a certain amount of cash was obtained, but the country lived from hand to mouth and everybody was unhappy. Added to this by March the formidable insurrection of the "White Wolf" bandits in Central China—under the legendary leadership of a man who was said to be invulnerable—necessitated the mobilization of a fresh army which ran into scores of battalions ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... knees and praying —"O Great Dragon! send us rain.'' It was pitiful. This country is fertile but the population is so enormous that, in the absence of any manufacturing or mining, the people even in the most favoured seasons live from hand to mouth, and a drought means the starvation ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... that carelessness and want of frugality observable among the poor, so contrary to the disposition frequently to be remarked among petty tradesmen and small farmers. The labouring poor, to use a vulgar expression, seem always to live from hand to mouth. Their present wants employ their whole attention, and they seldom think of the future. Even when they have an opportunity of saving they seldom exercise it, but all that is beyond their present necessities goes, ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... Swethland, where the woods are proper for naught els, and though there be the helpe both of man and beast in those ancient commonwealths, which many an hundred years have used it, yet thousands of those poor people can scarce get necessaries to live, but from hand to mouth, and though your factors there can buy as much in a week as will fraught you a ship, or as much as you please, you must not expect from us any such matter, which are but as many of ignorant, miserable soules, that are scarce able to get wherewith to live, and defend ourselves ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... towns there is a numerous class of 'roughs' known as the kullah-numdah (felt-caps; they wear a brown hard-felt low hat without a brim), excitable and reckless, and always ready for disturbance. They are the 'casuals', who live from hand to mouth, those to whom an appeal can be made by the careful working class when the price of bread is run up to famine figure, owing to the 'cornering' of wheat, which of late years has been much practised in Persia. The baker used to be the ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon
... Emperor announced in an order of the day that there would be a battle on the day following. The army welcomed this announcement with pleasure, in the hope that it would mean an end to their privations, for there had been no supply of rations for a month, and everyone had lived from hand to mouth. On both sides the evening was employed in ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... to hear him tell of his earlier days when he sold liniments and cough cures on street corners, living hand to mouth, heart to heart with the people, throwing heads or tails with fortune ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... enterprising in spirit. Frequently had he arrived at Fort Chipewyan with ninety or a hundred men without any provision for their sustenance for the winter save their fishing-nets and guns. He was therefore accustomed to live from hand to mouth, and to depend on his own exertions and resources in a country where the winter is upwards of eight months long and the ...
— The Pioneers • R.M. Ballantyne
... growled, slamming his fist against the bed. "The kind of twisted logic you expect from junkmen. They use us to feed them, give us the absolute minimum in return, and at the same time cut us off from the knowledge that will get us out of this hand to mouth existence. Worse, far worse, they cut us off from the stars and the rest of mankind." The hatred on his face was so strong ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... little household at Granton had got along about as usual. They lived from hand to mouth. It required sharp financiering to provide food and clothes for the ...
— Bound to Rise • Horatio Alger
... privileges of liberty, to seek employment for the sake of raising themselves and their children in the social scale, and to accumulate property. They are not merely free, but are becoming independent. Still the number of those who live from hand to mouth, in the indolent and useless possession of freedom, is very great. In Mr. Trollope's opinion, little is to be expected from the blacks. "To lie in the sun and eat bread-fruit and yams is the negro's idea of being free. Such freedom ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... caught of these two poor, unappreciated old men, living contentedly from hand to mouth, gayly propping each other up when one or the other weakened, had strangely affected him. If, as he reasoned, such battered hulks, stranded these many years on the dry sands of incompetency, with no outlook for themselves across the wide sea over which their contemporaries ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... That more products of the soil are not sent in this way is rather the fault of the wretched government than of the rayahs or agricultural laborers. They are ground to the very earth by iniquitous taxation, and only manage to live from hand to mouth in what should be ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... patronize these establishments are mainly vagrants, men who live from hand to mouth, and who will not be received by the humblest boarding-house. Some are doubtless unfortunate, but the majority are vagrants from choice. Some have irregular occupations, others get the price of their lodgings ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... about this poorer population of Rome. They must have lived from hand to mouth. Since their votes controlled elections, [16] they were courted by candidates for office and kept from grumbling by being fed and amused. Such poor citizens, too lazy for steady work, too intelligent to starve, formed, with the other riffraff of a great city, the elements of a dangerous mob. And ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER |
