"Working-class" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... never faltered from his profound confidence in those standards of his home. He had been kind, popular, and endlessly active. His undergraduate socialism had expanded simply and sincerely into a theory of administrative philanthropy. He knew the Webbs. He was as successful with working-class audiences as with fashionable congregations. His home life with Lady Ella (she was the daughter of the fifth Earl of Birkenholme) and his five little girls was simple, beautiful, and happy as few homes are ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... anew. But this hint must be understood as applied to the system in its general, not special application. There can be no doubt of its admirable effect in multitudes of individual cases: what we disapprove of, is the manner in which it addresses itself to the working-class as a body. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... The imminence of working-class action was an ever present and disturbing menace to the capitalists. To give one of many instances of how the workers were beginning to realize the necessity of this action, and how the capitalists ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... hug some of the most extravagant of habits. The average working-class family enjoys none of the fruits of cooeperation We keep each to our isolated family group, while the richer a person is the more does she gather under her roof representatives of other families. Her cook may come ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch
... decanters. Three planks placed on boards formed the counter, with Pere la Chaise always behind it. There were two or three small tables, as many chairs, and one big wooden bench. Here gathered the city's working-class, and often among them one might find a goodly number of the city's elite; for the wine and the beer of the old cabaretier were famous, and one could be sure in entering there to hear all ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... awakened and enlightened public conscience is the effort to provide the working-class with better houses. Did it occur to any one a hundred years ago to think whether the dwellings of the poor were sanitary, convenient or sunny? Do not forget that in the "good old times" cholera and typhus ...
— Optimism - An Essay • Helen Keller
... people of Ypres, though they fought on the French side, had good reason to be proud of the way in which they defended their homes; but the consequences of the siege were disastrous, for the commerce of the town never recovered the loss of the large working-class population which left ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... the present revolt in Russia, the socialist propaganda in that country has received from it an impetus unparalleled in the history of modern class wars. The heroic battle for freedom is being fought almost exclusively by the Russian working-class under the intellectual leadership of Russian socialists, thus once more demonstrating the fact that the class-conscious working-men have become the vanguard of all ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... days—nay, before many hours—had passed after my conversion, I was to be found praying in the cottages in the working-class quarters of the town in which I lived, talking in the slums, comforting the dying, and doing, so far as I knew how and had ability, what seemed to me most likely to help the poor and miserable classes, both for this world and the world ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... "Capital,'' that its salient passages must be known by anyone who wishes to understand the hold which Marxian Socialism has acquired over the intellect and imagination of a large proportion of working-class leaders. ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... first time across a paper called Justice, in which Mr. Bradlaugh was attacked, and which gave an account of a meeting of the Democratic Federation—not yet the Social Democratic—in which a man had, apparently unrebuked, said that "all means were justifiable to attain" working-class ends. I protested strongly against the advocacy of criminal means, declaring that those who urged the use of such means were the worst foes of social progress. A few weeks later the Echo repeated a speech of Mr. Hyndman's in ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... this very moment, Mrs. William Beresford, a highly respectable young matron who painted rather good pictures in her spinster days, when she was Penelope Hamilton of the great American working-class, Unlimited; but first Mrs. Beresford's dangerous illness, and then her death, have kept my dear boy a willing prisoner in Cannes, his heart sadly torn betwixt his love and duty to his mother and his desire ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... whom he is continually exploiting and oppressing. And other people who are in the same position as he believe him, commend him, and solemnly discuss with him measures for ameliorating the condition of the working-class, on whose exploitation their whole life rests, devising all kinds of possible methods for this, except the one without which all improvement of their condition is impossible, i. e., refraining from taking from them the ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... been made by other investigators. Le Play, a French social economist, who lived with the families which he observed, introduced the method of the monographic study of the economic organization of family life. Ernst Engel, from his study of the expenditure of Saxon working-class families, formulated so-called "laws" of the relation between family income and family outlay. Recent studies of family incomes and budgets by Chapin, Ogburn, and others have thrown additional light upon the relationship between wages and the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... the familiar streets, where he had so often strolled a few little years ago, he strolled again to-night, but how different a man! The usual processions of the working-class were thickening as the "after tea," leisure hours advanced: the "loafers" of the old type with soft slouched hats bent over their eyes, and with mouths full of very strong tobacco and language were posed artistically ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... had a tremendous stimulus in the meetings from the active participation of four of the most prominent theosophists in the country—two of whom are members of the vestry. They sharpened the line between spiritual and material things. They brought to the notice of working-class Socialists the essential things of the soul. They made the meetings a melting-pot in which the finest, best and most permanent things were made to stand out distinctly. The world affords not a better field either for the testing or propagating of their philosophy, ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... operatives, but the women and children in mining and other industries. Active as were his efforts and those of his colleagues, it is only within a generation that the fruit of their labor is plainly seen. As late as 1844, at the time Engel's notable book on "The Condition of the Working-Class in England" appeared, the labor of children of four and five years was still permitted; and women and children alike worked in mines, in brickyards, and other exposed and dangerous employments for the ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... necessity which forced the profit-grinders to collect their men first into workshops working by the division of labour, and next into great factories worked by machinery, and so gradually to draw them into the great towns and centres of civilization, gave birth to a distinct working-class or proletariat: and this it was which gave them their MECHANICAL existence, so to say. But note, that they are indeed combined into social groups for the production of wares, but only as yet mechanically; they do not know what they are working at, nor whom they are working for, because ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... long enough to encourage laziness in minds already disposed to lying fallow. Far be it from this pen to libel the English, but a feverish mental activity has never been their vice; intellect, especially in what is known as the working-class, is leisurely; it does not require to be encouraged to take its ease. Some one has asked me: "Can the ordinary worker think less in the army than when he wasn't in the army?" In other words: "Did he ever think at all?" The British worker is, of course, deceptive; ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... this part of the Front all summer. One by one they came out, these photographs, from weatherbeaten sacks, from shabby boxes, from under pillows, and the nurse must see them all. Pathetic little pictures they were, of common, working-class women, some fat and work-worn, some thin and work-worn, some with stodgy little children grouped about them, some without, but all were practically the same. They were the wives of these men in the beds here, the working-class wives of working-class men—the soldiers of the trenches. Ah ...
— The Backwash of War - The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an - American Hospital Nurse • Ellen N. La Motte
... these patients was none other than Euphrasie, old Moineaud's eldest daughter, now married to Auguste Benard, a mason, and already the mother of three children. She had doubtless resumed her usual avocations too soon after the birth of her last child, as often happens in working-class families where the mother is unable to remain idle. At all events, she had for some time been ailing, and had finally been removed to the hospital. Mathieu had for a while employed her young sister Cecile, now seventeen, as a servant in the house at Chantebled, but she was of poor health ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... Twerton, a populous working-class suburb on the W. side of Bath, with a station on the G.W.R. main line to Bristol. The name of the place (the town at the weir) betrays its Saxon origin, but the only thing known of its early history is that the Bath monks had a cloth mill here. A large clothing factory, which is one of the ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... men of the working-class. I say to you: Love honest women. Do not love harlots, nor imitations of harlots. Do not admire the idle women of the ruling class, nor those who ape them, and thereby glorify them. Do not admire languid limbs and pouting lips and the signs ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... as to lose money, but in this they seldom succeed. It has been calculated that only two per cent in every community succeed in reaching the pauper class. The tendency is for all the labors of the working-class to be ultimately turned upon the unfortunate wealthy class. The workmen being the creators of wealth, and refusing to take adequate pay, cause a final accumulation of the wealth of the community in the hands ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... the other working-class parties by this only: (1) In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. (2) In the various stages of development ...
— The Communist Manifesto • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
... advantage; they contribute indirectly to the increase of domestic comfort, and promote the contentment of the artisan. The songs of any people may be regarded as important means of forming an industrious, brave, loyal, and religious working-class." Mr Barnett calls this, "nothing but egregious cant, got up by the teachers of the Wilhelm plan, both in France and here." In this we cannot agree with Mr Barnett, and we scarcely understand why he should be betrayed into so much heat upon the occasion. For ourselves, we rejoice to see any system ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... reasoning individuals of all citizens, to develop moral and civic character, to train for life in organized society, and to serve as an instrument by means of which an ignorant, drunken, immoral, and shiftless working-class and peasantry might be elevated into men and women of character, intelligence, and directive power, was in Pestalozzi's conception the underlying meaning of the school. After Pestalozzi, the earlier conception as to the religious purpose of the ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... elector by phrases about set-offs and compensations and relief of burdens, 'seeming to loom in the future.' He rang the changes on mysterious new principles of taxation, but what they were to be, he did not disclose. The great change since 1846 was that the working-class had become strenuous free traders. They had in earlier times never been really convinced when Cobden and Bright assured them that no fall in wages would follow the promised fall in the price of food. It was ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... the study of the underlying causes and issues of the war. It does not pretend to cover the whole of so vast a field, and it will have attained its aim if it provides the basis for future discussion. It originated in the experience of its five writers at the Summer Schools for working-class students held in connection with the Workers' Educational Associations. In the early days of August, at the outbreak of the war, Summer Schools were in full swing at Oxford, Cambridge, Eton, Bangor, and Durham, and it at once ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... stimulated their intellectual powers and has so widened their whole outlook upon life as to raise them high above those of their own class who lived only for the present. All who have listened to the prayers of a devout Scotch elder of the working-class must have been struck by this combination of spiritual and intellectual power; and one thing they must have specially noticed is that, unlike the elder of contemporary fiction, he expressed himself, not in broad Scotch but in correct ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... adaptations which our people (the worse for them) practise perhaps less than any other. There was no assembling at the sake shop. Poor though the homes are, the men enjoy them; the children are an attraction at any rate, and the brawling and disobedience which often turn our working-class homes into bear-gardens are unknown here, where docility and obedience are inculcated from the cradle as a matter of course. The signs of religion become fewer as I travel north, and it appears that the little faith which exists consists mainly in a belief in ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird |
