"Unearned" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... found you had no title. I had just about that much income accumulated at my banker's while I've been herding sheep down here, so it was almost like picking the thing up on a bargain-counter for a penny. There's another little surplus of unearned increment piling up there, 'Tave. I've been thinking of a wedding trip in a yacht with white ribbons tied to the mast, through the Mediterranean, and then up among the Hebrides and down Norway ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... this is simple. The Government have refused to the workman the right to extort unearned increment out of the country in its dire necessity. The workman may not strike or cease work or even change employment without the permission of the State. Assuredly the State has the right to exact that ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... An awkward incident, of course, especially as it occurred in the dead of night, but scarcely enough to make half a novel out of. Naturally, in the end Leslie owns up about the heroism, and goes away to justify his unearned credit upon the stricken field; but I am afraid I must confess that the prospect of his return left me indifferent. I understand that The Reconnaissance originally appeared in The Daily Telegraph; this being ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... the corporations contracted to provide when they accepted their charters, have been divided as construction profits, or, as in the case of the Santa Fe, Union Pacific, and many others, diverted to the payment of unearned dividends, while the public suffers from this failure ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... the office was apparent to everybody. At the bottom of her heart, Sarah Maitland must have known that it was all a farce. Blair was worth nothing to the business; his only relation to it was the weekly drawing of an unearned "salary." Perhaps if Mrs. Richie had been in Mercer, to make again and again the appeal of confident expectation, that little feeble sense of duty which had started him upon his "career," might have struck a root down through feeling, into the rock-bed of character. But as it ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... fading beauty, "goddess who determineth all aright,—bless thou this land, though it wakes to call me traitor. Teach it to know I am innocent. Comfort Hermione, my wife. And restore me to Athens, after doing deeds which wipe out all my unearned shame!" ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... year, when she entered upon the study of ethics, she carried along an unearned and fragile reputation, built upon subterfuges and likely to crumble at the slightest touch. She had maintained it very creditably up to the Christmas vacation, and had argued upon the ultimate ground of moral obligation and the origin of conscience ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster
... because of the division of the nucleus and its associates and dependencies between those who work for a living, those who have an unearned income and those parasites who scrounge for a living. They perish because of the hard class and caste lines that grow out of economic contradictions; because of the development of a social pyramid, layer above layer, until ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... the back of the cart, so that it fell to the ground. "That will feed our horses for a week," he said with a chuckle, in which the other man joined. It was pleasant to become so easily possessed of an unearned increment in the shape ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... She had hoped to stir up his industry by showing him the Bible, and promising that when he could read it he should have it for his "very own." But he either could not or would not apply himself, so the prize lay unearned in Thomasina's trunk. But he would listen for any length of time to Scripture stories, if they were read or told him, especially to the history of Elisha, and the adventures ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... according to the income of the taxpayer but according to the alleged value of his property. It is thus, again, a variation of the system long adopted in this country of a special rate of income tax on what is called "unearned" income, i.e. income from invested property. But it is only when one begins to adopt the broadminded views lately fashionable of the possibilities of a levy on capital and to talk of taking, say, 20 per cent. of the value of a man's property from him in the course of a year, that it becomes ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... not false that yonder man lies dead and that you slew him, as you yourself admit. Learn now, and let all Egypt learn, that even an Israelite may not be murdered for no offence save that of weariness and of paying back unearned blow with blow. Your blood shall answer for his blood. ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard
... Bible is right when it says, 'The wages of sin is death,' doesn't it?" asked Mrs. Comstock. "Instead of doing a woman's work in life, you chose the smile of invitation, and the dress of unearned cloth. Now you tell me you are marked to burn to death with the unquenchable fire. And him! It was shorter with him, but let me tell you he got his share! He left me with an untruth on his lips, for he told me he was going to take his violin to Onabasha ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... to this part of his teaching, in which Fitzjames took little interest, I shall only notice that, whatever his concessions, he was still in principle an 'individualist.' He maintained against the Socialists the advantages of competition; and though his theory of the 'unearned increment' looks towards the socialist view of nationalisation of the land, he seems to have been always in favour of peasant proprietorship, and of co-operation as distinguished from State socialism. Individualism, in fact, in one of its senses, for like ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... middle and upper ranks taking no share in the proceedings. The speakers pointed out in impressive and forcible language the various evils which they said had brought about their altered condition; the waste of public money in perpetual wars, in unearned pensions, sinecures, and other unjust expenditure. The high price of provisions provoked riots at Brandon, Norwich, Newcastle, Ely, Glasgow, Preston, Leicester, Merthyr, Tredegar, and other places; a large number of the populace assembled in ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... Billy beckoned to his friends, who speedily overtook him. When the party turned the corner of Front Street and were safely out of sight of Judge Straight's office, the capitalist entered the grocery store and invested his unearned increment in gingerbread. When the ensuing saturnalia was over, Billy finished the game of marbles which the judge had interrupted, and then set out to execute his commission. He had nearly reached his ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... bad one in my opinion. Now, after making the usual unjust allowance for interest on thirty pounds for twelve years or so that had elapsed, the sale of the picture would have brought me in a profit of over seven hundred and fifty pounds, an unearned increment to which I had no righteous claim. My solicitor, to whom I mentioned the matter, was of opinion that I might justifiably pocket the seven hundred and fifty pounds as reward for my mother's benevolence in buying a presumably worthless ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... one cannot receive cheques for one thousand pounds without, in some shape or form, giving a quid pro quo. Now Philip's quid was to rid his house and the neighbourhood of Arthur Heigham, his guest and his daughter's lover. It was not a task he liked, but the unearned cheque in his breeches- pocket continually reminded him of ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... he who in the morning time Sets forth upon his journey with no staff Shaped by another for his use. Who sees The imminent necessity for toil, And with each morning wakens to the thought Of tasks that wait his doing. Never yet Has unearned leisure and the gift of gold Bestowed such benefits upon the young As need and loneliness; and when life adds The burden of a duty, difficult, And hard to carry, then rejoice, O soul! And know thyself one chosen for high things. Behind thee walk the Helpers. Yet lead on! They only ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... bull's-eye on another. We sail for a certain port, where, unknown to us, pirates lie in wait, and God sends His storms and drives us upon Treasure Island. There we load up with ingots; the high tide floats us, and we sail away for home with our unearned increment to tell the untraveled natives how we most surely are the people and that wisdom will die ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... cartridge capable of being discharged, and the Su-chen and her crew would by this time undoubtedly have been the prize of the pirates. And all this that some pampered mandarin or contractor might have a supply of unearned money wherewith to buy luxuries that he neither deserved nor needed. ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... which we call a trust fund. I see it is appealing to you. It could not be otherwise. Now, with this aggregate, you, and I, and everyone can own vast estates, buy forty-year debentures, lend money on approved security, buy real estate, the unearned increment of which will net in some cases two or three hundred per cent. interest, besides an increased valuation on ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... most amazing cuckoo in many directions,' said the Nilghai, still chuckling over the thought of the dinner. 'Never mind. We had both been working very hard, and it was your unearned increment we spent, and as you're only a ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... two times, dear, when I dared a little of the labor of things, and drank a drop or two of the wine of the spirit; and those times have lived to haunt me and make me at least not a happy man in my unearned ease. There come to me still just once in a while hours when I get sight of the gleam, hours that make me loathe all that in my hours of comfort I loved; and there comes over me then a kind of Titanic rage, that I should go down a beaten soul because ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... consistency I can not profess myself a member in good standing. In view of this general recreancy and treason to the principles that our fathers established by the sword—having in constant observation this almost universal hospitality to the solemn nonsense of hereditary rank and unearned distinction, my faith in practical realization of republican ideals is small, and I falter in the work of their maintenance in the interest of a people for whom they are too good. Seeing that we are immune to none of the evils besetting monarchies, excepting ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... last three hundred years the American people have been living on the unearned increment of the unoccupied land. But now that all our land has been staked out in homesteads and we cannot turn to new soil when we have used up the old, we must learn, as the older races have learned, how to keep up the supply of plant food. Only ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... evolutionary process, and to deduce our moral precepts at any given stage by applying our reason to the scrutiny of this process at that stage. This scrutiny is a laborious one; but Truth is the prize of effort in the search therefor, it is not an unearned gift to the ...
— The Basis of Morality • Annie Besant
... before all of you for what he has done for me personally. When I landed in Panama I was a rotter. I'd never worked, and never intended to; I rather despised people who did. I represented the unearned increment. I was broke and friendless, and what ideas I had were all wrong. This is something you don't know, perhaps, but no sooner had I landed than I got into trouble of the worst sort, and Mr. Cortlandt got me ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... with the hands, or, indeed, in just living! While they think of themselves cannily as "practical" men, I think them the most impractical men I know, for in a world full of boundless riches they remain obstinately poor. They are unwilling to invest even a few of their dollars unearned in the real wealth of the earth. For it is only the sense of the spirit of life, whether in nature or in other human beings, that lifts men above the beasts and curiously leads them to God, who is the spirit both ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... that they owed the world, and to Katharine, at least, it meant more than that, for if they could not between them get this one book accomplished they had no right to their privileged position. Their increment became yearly more and more unearned. Besides, it must be established indisputably that her grandfather was a very ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... democratic ownership of industry, beginning with the simplest type of public utilities and monopolies, and extending gradually as we learn the way; the use of taxation to limit inheritance and to take the unearned increment for public use beginning (but not ending) with a "single tax" on monopolized land values; the training of the public in business technique by co-operation in buying and selling, and in industrial technique by the shop committee and ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... thirty-eight millions to be spent by his Department this year. But let no one mistake him for a mere HORNE of Plenty, pouring out benefits indiscriminately upon the genuine unemployed and the work-shy. He has already deprived some seventeen thousand potential domestics of their unearned increment, and he promises ruthless prosecution of all who try to cheat ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... whether it might mean fortune or poverty to the girl he loved, and feeling that, after all, his labors might heap great unearned rewards on Fairfax, bestowing on himself the mere hollow consciousness that his work had been well performed, he was presently seated once more in a train that roared its way ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... long night hours following Mary Everton's visit I was far enough, I hope, from envying Barrett; far enough, too, from the thought that I might ever venture to ask any good and innocent young woman to step down with me into the abyss of unearned infamy into which I had been flung, largely through the efforts of another woman who was neither good nor innocent. None the less, the delight which was half intoxication remained and the night ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... unearned increment of blows—this dash of bitter added to the regulation cup—that made Jack's gorge rise. He was not the sort of chap, it must be confessed, to be ruled with a feather. "An impudent rascal" at the best ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... was very thick and a stinging wind had risen, while he would have trouble in reaching camp if his trail got drifted up. He knew he should have turned back earlier, but there was what seemed to be an extensive wood in front, and he could not face the thought of returning empty-handed to his scanty, unearned supper. The grey trees were not far away; he might reach them and make a mile or two on the back trail before dark, though he was weary and hunger had given him a pain in his ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... "I admit that. What with the extra tax on unearned income and the insurance of servants against accidents, and this infernal new unemployment insurance, and ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... are subalterns, utter superficiality will have become their rule in life; from which, despite responsibility, they are unable to break loose, and according to which, therefore, they act. Then, when they are found to be good for nothing, they are either retired, and eat the unearned bread of pensioners (unearned, of course, only in such cases as theirs), or, if they have a cousin or great-uncle anywhere, who can put in a good word for them, or if they belong to the best families, or if they are very religious—why, then God Almighty intervenes, and the scandal ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... want me to take the other side on that question so you can have another unearned victory? I refuse to humor the invalid any longer and I agree. The proposition that it is glorious to live on such an afternoon as this is carried unanimously. But I will never agree that you can grow dates ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... square miles, earned yearly returns equal as a rule to the total of the capital invested. Money changed hands rapidly, credits did the work of capital, and the rapid growth of population added large unearned increments to the fortunes of those who owned land or had ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... The worker must starve so that a few rich people may live in luxury, and things will become better for the worker only when there are no more rich men. "The gains of the capitalist are simply the losses of labour! The partly or wholly unearned incomes of the rich consist of the unpaid, withheld wages of the industrious poor."[117] "Only by living off another man's labour and denying another man the fruits of his toil can riches be acquired. Riches are directly ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... interest and emotion; those that I dimly made you out as getting while I flattened my nose against the shop window and you were there within, eating the tarts, shall I say, or handing them over the counter? It's to-day as if you had taken all the trouble for me and left me at last all the unearned increment or fine psychological gain! I have hovered about two or three of your distinguished persons a bit longingly (in the past); but you open up the abysses, or such like, that I really missed, and the torch you play over them is ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... together a group of half-educated men in the face of public sentiment such as existed in this city, I might not have the same carefree, laughing attitude towards life as a certain rich young man whose pockets were stuffed with unearned increments. ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... deal of truth in the old saying—that it takes three generations to make a gentleman and there is no doubt but that the second is infinitely the worst of the three. Shortly the country will pass through a period when an unearned increment will fall into the hands of a half-educated class, whose life has nurtured in them strong animal passions; but I see no reason why we should not pass through the social as we are passing through the political ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... past 9 this evening she that was the life of my life passed to the relief & the peace of death after as months of unjust & unearned suffering. I first saw her near 37 years ago, & now I have looked upon her face for the last time. Oh, so unexpected!... I was full of remorse for things done & said in these 34 years of married life ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... this amazing testimony you may detect a contempt of human life and justice, an indifference to suffering, an eager lust after unearned dollars, which are without parallel. The persons who play their part in this austere, begrimed tragi-comedy, come for the most part from oversea, and have but a halting knowledge of the language spoken by judges and senators. Yet their very ignorance stamps ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... property in Europe derives its origin from force;' so the legislature is entitled to interpose for the reclamation of rights unjustly usurped from the community; while, as economical science shows that the value of land rises from natural causes, the conclusion is that the State may confiscate the unearned increment. But it was not so easy to convince the hungry mechanic, by rather fine-drawn distinctions, that the capitalist had a better right to monopolise profits than the landlord; for the rise of value in manufactured commodities has very complex ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... been lightly given; unearned money is always easily spent; besides, a teacher's salary seemed rolling wealth to the girl who had never had a whole dollar in her life. The question of paying the next year's interest was for the time settled. The next morning the healthy ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... treason or let him blow off steam and exhaust. They wisely chose the latter course. Prosperity came to the town. The man sold his small bit of real estate for something under a hundred thousand. He didn't stay to divide his unearned increment among his fellow agitators. He hied him to retire to the land where "the flag was a bloody rag." This, of course, proves nothing for or against Socialism as a system. There was a Judas among the apostles; but it illustrates the point that Canada is still at the stage where ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... never have been thought of, if they had not been forbidden. The boy enjoyed this kind of father at the time, and later he came to understand, with a grateful heart, that there is no richer inheritance in all the treasury of unearned blessings. For, after all, the love, the patience, the kindly wisdom of a grown man who can enter into the perplexities and turbulent impulses of a boy's heart, and give him cheerful companionship, and lead ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... hearth, I may cry Haro, haro! and you will take heed? But when it is blood of my blood, bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh that he has wickedly seized; when it is the head I have pillowed on my breast for four years—the child that has known no father, his mother's only companion in her unearned shame, the shame of an outcast—then is it so that your law of Haro may not apply? Messieurs, it is the justice of Haro that I ask, not your lax usage of it. From this Prince Philip I appeal to the spirit of Prince Rollo who made this law. I appeal to the law of Jersey which is the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... all. My reputation is unearned, though useful. Just before I came here, a young chap showed up from nowhere and loafed around Manzanita. He was a pretty kind of lad, and one night in the Sick Coyote some of the old-timers tried to put something over on him. When ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... dying to go. "But I feel a certain duty is due to the firm, old man. What I mean is, that the boy's only just come here and I feel that in my position as a partner it wouldn't look well for me practically with my own hand to be paying out unearned salary to a chap who'd not been four months in the place. ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... as long as I have been doing the talking, I may as well continue. We'll keep quiet until we are sure this traitor's men are out of earshot and then we'll take possession of Mr. Nicolas and his unearned gold." ...
— The Boy Allies in the Balkan Campaign - The Struggle to Save a Nation • Clair W. Hayes |
