This is the unstable, mob-minded mass, which sits on the fence, ever ready to fall this side or that and indecorously clamber back again; which puts a Democratic administration into office one election, and a Republican the next; which discovers and.
It was not a column, but a mob, an awful river that filled the street, the people of the abyss, mad with drink and wrong, up at last and roaring for the blood of their masters. I had seen the people of the abyss before, gone through its ghettos, and thought I knew it; but I found that I was now looking on it for the first time. Dumb apathy had vanished. It was now dynamic – a fascinating spectacle of dread.
Labor takes its share in wages; capital takes its share in profits.
We are all prone to think there is something wrong with the mental processes of the man who disagrees with us.
When I think of the play of force and matter, and all the tremendous struggle of it, I feel as if I could write an epic on the grass.
There is a greater strength than wealth, and it is greater because it cannot be taken away. Our strength, the strength of the proletariat, is in our muscles, in our hands to cast ballots, in our fingers to pull triggers.
Life’s a game and men the gamblers. They’ll stake their whole pile on the one chance in a thousand. Take away that one chance, and – they won’t play.
Dogs asleep in the sun often whined and barked, but they were unable to tell what they saw that made them whine and bark. He had often wondered what it was. And that was all he was, a dog asleep in the sun.
And don’t forget that it is the press, the pulpit, and the university that mould public opinion, set the thought-pace of the nation. As for the artists, they merely pander to the little less than ignoble tastes of the Plutocracy.
Steward, Daughtry. Mr. Daughtry, friend, sir, or whatever I may name you, this is no fairy-story of the open boat, the cross-bearings unnamable, and the treasure a fathom under the sand. This is real. I have a heart. That, sir” – here he waved his extended hand under Daughtry’s nose – “is my hand. There is only one thing you may do, must do, right now. You must take that hand in your hand, and shake it, with your heart in your hand as mine is in my hand.
All the world is topsy-turvy, and it has been topsy-turvy ever since the plague.
Dat one dam bully dog! Eh? How moch?
I, for one, never can have too many books; nor can my books cover too many subjects. I may never read them all, but they are always there, and I never know what strange coast I am going to pick up at any time in sailing the world of knowledge.
Childish and immaterial as the topic was, the quality of their reasoning was still more childish and immaterial. In truth, there was very little reasoning or none at all. Their method was one of assertion, assumption, and denunciation.
All life likes power, and Beauty Smith was no exception. Denied the expression of power amongst his own kind, he fell back upon the lesser creatures and there vindicated the life that was in him. But Beauty Smith had not created himself, and no blame was to be attached to him. He had come into the world with a twisted body and a brute intelligence. This had constituted the clay of him, and it had not been kindly moulded by the world.
That is why they are for’ard, in that pigsty of a forecastle, because they lack the iron.
No matter how breathless the air when he dug his nest by tree or bank, the wind the later blew inevitably found him to leeward, sheltered and snug.
He alone rated himself beyond diamonds and rubies. Diamonds and rubies are gone, spread out on the deck to be washed away by a bucket of sea-water, and he does not even know that the diamonds and rubies are gone. He does not lose anything, for with the loss of himself he loses the knowledge of loss. Don’t you see? And what have you to say?
And so we come to it – the everlasting mystery of woman. One may not be able to get along with her; yet is it patent, as of old time, that one cannot get along without her.
Saints in heaven – how could they be anything but fair and pure? No praise to them. But saints in slime – ah, that was the everlasting wonder! That was what made life worth while.