"Working class" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rather than get out, and those who can't get in hang on outside like limpets and refuse to be kicked off; that the Russian workmen in organising their trade unions must start right and keep them free of every element except the working class." ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... before. "At last," Mr. Gladstone said, "we have obtained a declaration from an authoritative source that a bill which, in a country with five millions of adult males, proposes to add to a limited constituency 200,000 of the middle class and 200,000 of the working class, is, in the judgment of the leader of the Tory party, a bill to reconstruct the ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... like to point out to you how this affects the homekeeping woman, the wife and mother, of the working class, aside from the wage-earning woman. Consider the woman at home who must make both ends meet on a small income. Who better than she knows whether or not the cost of living advances more rapidly than the wage does? Is not that a true statement in the most practical ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... were accepted by the labor officials, including President Green of the A. F. of L. As soon as the big employers learned about the program they not only frowned upon the idea of allowing their sacred temples to be contaminated with representatives of the working class, but put both feet down as hard as they could on the proposition. Did the clergymen stand firm when men with dollars talked? To their everlasting shame they did not. Ninety-five percent of them bowed ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... that under any circumstances Anarchism is but another word for reaction; and the more honest the men and women who play this reactionist game, the more tragic and dangerous it becomes for the whole working class movement. ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... home. Here and there exceptional industry or extraordinary capacity raised the artisan to wealth and turned the "man" into the "master." But for the most part even industry and endowment were powerless against the inertia of custom and the dead-weight of environment. The universal ignorance of the working class broke down the aspiring force of genius. Mute inglorious Miltons were ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... breakfast time. I had to pretend to eat, but I ate so little that both Lute and Dorinda once more commented upon my lack of appetite. Lute, who had never become fully reconciled to my becoming a member of the working class, hastened to lay the blame for my condition upon my labors ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... good-humouredly, why she didn't get married. Lord Borrodaile had privately asked for enlightenment on the same score. Vida had only smiled. One man varied the monotony by demanding why, if it would be a good thing for the working class to have women voting, why didn't the Labour ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... day when war, and the causes of war, should be obsolete. The Socialist Movement, a growing force in all industrial communities, stood for the same ideal, and for the international comradeship of the working class. Law and medicine, science and scholarship followed suit; and every summer, in quest of health and change, thousands of plain citizens have crossed international frontiers with scarcely greater sense of change than in moving from province ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... American woman remains a steady buyer of luxuries. The mobilization of women as workers is no more essential to the triumph of our cause, than the mobilization of women for thrift. The beginning and end of saving in America rests almost entirely in the hands of women. They are the buyers in the working class and in the professional class. Among the wealthy they set the standard ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch
... middle classes wearing something like a large table-cloth, with a hole in the middle for the head to go through. This is often as coarse as a blanket, but being beautifully woven with various colors, is quite showy at a distance. Among the Mexicans there is no working class; (the Indians being slaves and doing all the hard work;) and every rich man looks like a grandee, and every poor scamp like a broken-down gentleman. I have often seen a man with a fine figure, and ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... began, and then paused a second. A curious hesitance came upon her, though she knew that under ordinary circumstances such hesitation would have been totally out of place. She had occupied the man's time for an hour or more, he was of the working class, and one must not be guilty of the error of imagining that a man who has work to do can justly spend his time in one's service for the mere pleasure of it. She knew what custom demanded. Why should she hesitate ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... get tired of praising Lincoln. One day he came to me and said with that quiet manner he had when he was most in earnest, 'Hans, we must do something to offset Gladstone's damned infernal support of the slave-traders. We must show President Lincoln that the working class in this country feel and know that he is in the right. And Abraham Lincoln belongs to us, Hans; he's a son ...
— The Marx He Knew • John Spargo
... both felt that it was not exactly proper. Not alone because of the privacy and holiness of the subject, but because of what might have been prudery in the middle class, but which in them was the modesty and reticence found in individuals of the working class when they strive after clean ...
— The Game • Jack London
... think over what they have done in the day, or what they expect to do to- morrow; and they escape from that dreary round of business thought in liquor or narcotics. There are still those, by no means of the hand-working class, but absorbed all day by business, who drink heavily at night in their own comfortable homes, simply to recreate their over-burdened minds. Such cases, doubtless, are far less common than they were ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... the Russian working class as the great element that was destined to work out the political and economic salvation of the country, and at this he tactlessly dwelt on the Russian trade-unions, on what he termed their revolutionary strikes, and upon the aid Russian capitalists gave the Government ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... Of the test they employed nothing need be said here except that it was a large questionnaire. For the sake of the illustration, assume that the questions were a fair test of mental equipment for English city life. Theoretically, then, those questions should have been put to every member of the working class. But it is not so easy to know who are the working class. However, assume again that the census knows how to classify them. Then there were roughly 104,000 men and 107,000 women who ought to have been questioned. They possessed the answers which would justify ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... their proceedings; and these were not interchanged. In another experiment, after supplying a hive deprived of a queen with brood and pollen, we saw the small bees quickly occupied in nutrition of the larvae, while those of the wax working class neglected them. Small bees also produce wax, but in a very inferior quantity to what is elaborated ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... The working class is represented in such characters as Madame Remonencq (Le Cousin Pons) and Madame Cardinal (Les petits Bourgeois), while the servant class is well shown in the person of the grand Nanon (Eugenie Grandet), the faithful Fanny (La Grenadiere), and many others. ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... theatres, hotels, and shopping district, the banks and the staid, respectable business houses. South of the Slot were the factories, slums, laundries, machine-shops, boiler works, and the abodes of the working class. ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... have never known it in practice. Hosts of the poor are driven to the workhouse without ever having known the house. Generally speaking, the cultured class is shrieking to be let out of the decent home, just as the working class is shouting to ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... proletarians, eking out their existence upon a miserable salary, and beholden in all their comings and goings to the wealthy holders of privilege. Even in the Roman Catholic Church that is true. The ordinary priest is a man of the working class, and knows what working people suffer and feel. So in the Catholic Church there are proletarian rebellions; there is many a priest who does not carry out the political orders of his superiors, but goes to the polls and votes for his class instead of for his pope. In Ireland, as I write, the ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... teeth seem to point to an hereditary taint. Also unmistakable signs of a greater or lesser admixture of black blood are numerous. As a rule, the Portuguese are dark-complexioned, with large dark eyes and black hair; but, of course, one meets many exceptions. The men of the working class are fond of wearing enormous bushy whiskers, and women of all classes are accustomed to wear moustachios. The thin line of softest down which accentuates the ripe lips of the senhorina of some seventeen summers becomes an unattractive incident in the broad countenance of ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... agreed upon. But again this is only a false appearance. As we saw by our analysis, a part of the wage-slave's day is devoted to paid labor and a part to unpaid. Here wages or the money relation conceals the unpaid labor and disguises under the mask of a voluntary bargain the struggle of the working class to diminish or abolish unpaid labor, and the class-conscious, pitiless struggle of the capitalist class to increase the unpaid labor and reduce the paid labor to the minimum, i. e., to or below the level ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... with it In 1848, the year of revolutions, the discontented middle class, unable to rouse the Church-and-State governments of the day from their bondage to custom, caste, and law by appeals to morality or constitutional agitation for Liberal reforms, made common cause with the starving wage-working class, and resorted to armed rebellion, which reached Dresden in 1849. Had Wagner been the mere musical epicure and political mugwump that the term "artist" seems to suggest to so many critics and amateurs—that ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... Bishop White and his associates were not to blame for failure to provide bread that all this unanticipated multitude of toilers should eat. And yet a failure there has been. No one who has not labored at the task of trying to commend the Church of the Prayer Book to the working class, as it is represented in our large manufacturing towns, can know how lamentable that failure is. We gather in the rich and the poor, but the great middle class that makes the staple and the strength of American ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... students, who were chiefly young men of the working class, with sound instruction in the various branches of science, the lectures were delivered and the classes were superintended by men of established ability in their several departments. This course was regularly pursued from its fundamental and elementary principles to the highest point ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... if not with him at least with others; and which concerns this matter of the true story of England. For the true story is so entirely different from the false official story that the official classes tell that by this time the working class itself has largely forgotten its own experience. Either story can be quite logically linked up with Female Suffrage, which, therefore, I leave where it is for the moment; merely confessing that, so ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... their living with their hands; THAT ARE EMPLOYED, AND PAID WAGES: are gathered under roofs of factories, sent out on farms, sent out on ships, gathered on the walls. In popular acceptation, the working class means the men that work with their hands, for wages, so many hours a day, employed by great capitalists; that work for everybody else. Why do we move for this class? "Why," asks a critic, "don't ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... a woman of the working class consists in earning sufficient to feed, clothe, light and heat the family, besides supplying the soldier husband with tobacco and a monthly parcel of goodies. Even the children have felt the call, and after school, which lasts from eight until four, little girls whose legs must ache ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... the neighborhood of which I may call my "beat" carry with them unmistakable evidences of the American type. I have seen so little of that foreign element that is popularly supposed to be the real working class of the great metropolis, that I have often been inclined to doubt statistics. The ground that my morning rambles cover extends from Twenty-third Street to Washington Park, and laterally from Sixth Avenue to Broadway. The early rising artisans that I meet ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... motionless, and looked at him doubtfully. She was quite young and pretty, but her face was drawn and wearied-looking, as though she were a convalescent or one who was in trouble. She was of the working class. ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... merely insubordinate discontent of the many with the few, under any conditions, so long as it was a formula for class jealousy and warfare, they were both repelled by it. If she had had any illusions about the working class possessing as a class any profounder political wisdom or more generous public impulses than any other class, those illusions had long since departed. People were much the same, she thought, in every class; ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... the ex-Capuchin's advice and waited for the dusk of the evening. I had a good reception, but the supper was poor, and the hours that I spent with two young girls of the working class were tedious. They were pretty enough, but my head was full of my perfidious charmer, and besides, despite their neatness and prettiness, they were wanting in that grace which adds so many charms to pleasure. The liberality of my payment, to which they were not accustomed, captivated ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... turnips and potatoes, eggs, perch, macaroni-cheese, custard pudding, gruyere cheese, and fair vin ordinaire. Two shillings was charged per head, and I must say people got their money's worth, for appetites seem keen in these parts. The mother-superior, a kindly old woman, evidently belonging to the working class, bustled about and shook hands with each of her guests. After dinner we were shown the bedrooms, which are very clean; for board and lodging you pay six francs a day, out of which, judging from the ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... this time. Tom becomes involved with a local barmaid. The barmaid being of a different social class than Tom, this relationship causes problems for both of them, and it is important for the modern reader to realize that such social distinctions were very real and inflexible in those days. The working class referred to the educated class as their "betters", meaning better educated and entitled to better respect, regardless of whether it ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... necessities of their existence. In other words, the luxurious or investing class has cut off its peace-time fripperies, saved and lent to the Government; the Government has paid the bulk of this money to the working class, who have spent most of it in what to them would be fripperies in time of peace. It may be, it is, all to the good that luxurious tastes should be clipped from the wealthy, and a higher standard of living secured ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... which the distinction between a leisure and a working class arises is a division maintained between men's and women's work in the lower stages of barbarism. Likewise the earliest form of ownership is an ownership of the women by the able bodied men of the community. The facts may be expressed in more general ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... she blamed, or judged at all, women who did as she would not; but she could not, simply could not, however hard she might be driven, do those things—though she could easily understand how other women did them in preference to sinking down into the working class or eking out a frowsy existence in some poor boarding-house. The temptation would be great. Thank Heaven, it was not teasing her. She would resist ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... against patriotism and its bloody spectre, militarism. Thousands of men fill the prisons of France, Germany, Russia, and the Scandinavian countries, because they dared to defy the ancient superstition. Nor is the movement limited to the working class; it has embraced representatives in all stations of life, its chief exponents being men and women prominent in art, ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... gone to the workman, while yet socially and intellectually he remains little less weak, or starved, or subject than before. When he died he left to Raeburn a legacy of feelings and ideas, all largely concerned with this contrast between the huge and growing "tyranny" of the working class and the individual helplessness or bareness of the working man. And it was these feelings and ideas which from the beginning made a link between Raeburn and the young revolts and compassions of Marcella Boyce. They were at one in their love of Edward Hallin; and after Hallin's death, in ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... squandered by wealthy vagabonds in the dens of vice that disfigure the sunny shores of the Mediterranean. We intercept that wealth. We restore it to circulation among the class that produced it and that chiefly needs it—the working class. We do this at the risk of our lives and liberties, by the exercise of the virtues of courage, endurance, foresight, and abstinence—especially abstinence. I myself have eaten nothing but prickly pears and broiled rabbit ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... might of Government was used in the aggrandizement and perpetuation of a propertied aristocracy, what was its specific attitude toward the working class? Of the powerful few, whether political or industrial, the conventional histories hand down grossly biased and distorted chronicles. These few are isolated from the multitude, and their importance magnified, while the millions of obscure are nowhere adequately ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... as regards enthusiasm, I have got as much of it as any one; but I believe that the reality will have none of it, and that with the reign of men of business, manufacturers, the working class (which is the most selfish of all), Jews, English of the old school and Germans of the new school, has been ushered in a materialist age in which it will be as difficult to bring about the triumph of a generous idea as to produce the silvery ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan |
