This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at ...the same time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A machine is characterized by sustained, autonomous action. It is set up by human hands and then is more or less set loose from hu...man control. It is designed to come between man and nature, to affect the natural world without requiring or indeed allowing humans to come into contact with it. Such is the clock, which abstracts the measurement of time from the sun and the stars: such is the steam engine, which turns coal into power to move ships or pump water without the intervention of human muscles. A tool, unlike a machine, is not self-sufficient or autonomous in action. It requires the skill of a craftsman and, when handled with skill, permits him to reshape the world in his way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"The room's very hot, with all this crowd," the Professor said to Sylvie. "I wonder why they don't put some lumps of ice in the gr...ate? You fill it with lumps of coal in the winter, you know, and you sit round it and enjoy the warmth. How jolly it would be to fill it now with lumps of ice, and sit round it and enjoy the coolth!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsif...ies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Shea--they call him Scholar Jack-- Went down the list of the dead.... Officers, seamen, gunners, marines, The crews of the gig and yawl, The bearded man and the lad in his teens, Carpenters, coal-passers--all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mr. Christian, it is about time for many people to begin to come to the White House to discuss different phases of the coal strike.... When anybody comes, if his special problem concerns the state, refer him to the governor of Pennsylvania. If his problem has a national phase, refer him to the United States Coal Commission. In no event bring him to me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or... a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making "ladies" dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In those days, the blag slag, the waste of the coal pits, had only begun to cover the side of our hill. Not enough to mar the coun...tryside nor blacken the beauty of our village. For the colliery had only begun to poke its skinny black fingers between the green.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Instead of feeling a poverty when we encounter a great man, let us treat the new comer like a travelling geologist, who passes thr...ough our estate, and shows us good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our brush pasture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The book of Nature is the book of Fate. She turns the gigantic pages,--leaf after leaf,--never returning one. One leaf she lays do...wn, a floor of granite; then a thousand ages, and a bed of slate; a thousand ages, and a measure of coal; a thousand ages, and a layer of marl and mud; vegetable forms appear; her first misshapen animals, zoophyte, trilobium, fish; then, saurians,--rude forms, in which she has only blocked her future statue, concealing under these unwieldy monsters the fine type of her coming king. The face of the planet cools and dries, the races meliorate, and man is born. But when a race has lived its term, it comes no more again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »