How much time, approximately, can a worker in a hectic, speeded-up world give to his work and be a sane, all-round, informed, and ...recreated citizen? Unless he lives near his work, due allowance must be made for going and coming. Eight hours for sleep and eight hours for family and social life, education, recreation, and other activities which include, in the case of many women workers, keeping house and clothes in order and taking care of a family, and in the case of all workers, occasional visits to dentists and doctors, paying gas bills and the thousand and one other things an increasingly complicated life thrusts upon even the humblest, seem minimal for the "mechanics of living."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The labor of keeping house is labor in its most naked state, for labor is toil that never finishes, toil that has to be begun agai...n the moment it is completed, toil that is destroyed and consumed by the life process.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Responsibility for political conditions thousands of miles away can no longer be avoided, I think, by this great Nation. Certainly... I don't want to live to see another war. As I have said, the world is smaller, smaller every year. The United States now exerts a tremendous influence in the cause of peace. What we people over here are thinking and talking about is in the interest of peace because it is known all over the world. The slightest remark in either House of Congress is known all over the world the following day. We will continue to exert that influence only if we are willing to share in the responsibility of keeping the peace.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
On the whole, yes, I would rather be the Chief Justice of the United States, and a quieter life than that which becomes at the Whi...te House is more in keeping with the temperament, but when taken into consideration that I go into history as President, and my children and my children's children are the better placed on account of that fact, I am inclined to think that to be President well compensates one for all the trials and criticisms he has to bear and undergo.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At length, by mid-afternoon, after we had had two or three rainbows over the sea, the showers ceased, and the heavens gradually cl...eared up, though the wind still blowed as hard and the breakers ran as high as before. Keeping on, we soon after came to a charity-house, which we looked into to see how the shipwrecked mariners might fare. Far away in some desolate hollow by the seaside, just within the bank, stands a lonely building on piles driven into the sand, with a slight nail put through the staple, which a freezing man can bend, with some straw, perchance, on the floor on which he may lie, or which he may burn in the fireplace to keep him alive. Perhaps this hut has never been required to shelter a shipwrecked man, and the benevolent person who promised to inspect it annually, to see that the straw and matches are here, and that the boards will keep off the wind, has grown remiss and thinks that storms and shipwrecks are over; and this very night a perishing crew may pry open its door with their numbed fingers and leave half their number dead here by morning. When I thought what must be the condition of the families which alone would ever occupy or had occupied them, what must have been the tragedy of the winter evenings spent by human beings around their hearths, these houses, though they were meant for human dwellings, did not look cheerful to me. They appeared but a stage to the grave. The gulls flew around and screamed over them; the roar of the ocean in storms, and the lapse of its waves in calms, alone resounds through them, all dark and empty within, year in, year out, except, perchance, on one memorable night. Houses of entertainment for shipwrecked men! What kind of sailor's homes were they?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This "charity-house," as the wrecker called it, this "Humane house," as some call it, that is, the one to which we first came, had... neither window nor sliding shutter, nor clapboards, nor paint. As we have said, there was a rusty nail put through the staple. However, as we wished to get an idea of a Humane house, and we hoped that we should never have a better opportunity, we put our eyes, by turns, to a knot-hole in the door, and, after long looking, without seeing, into the dark,--not knowing how many shipwrecked men's bones we might see at last, looking with the eye of faith, knowing that, though to him that knocketh it may not always be opened, yet to him that looketh long enough through a knot-hole the inside shall be visible,--for we had had some practice at looking inward,--by steadily keeping our other ball covered from the light meanwhile, putting the outward world behind us, ocean and land, and the beach,--till the pupil became enlarged and collected the rays of light that were wandering in that dark (for the pupil shall be enlarged by looking; there was never so dark a night but a faithful and patient eye, however small, might at last prevail over it),--after all this, I say, things began to take shape to our vision,--if we may use this expression where there was nothing but emptiness,--and we obtained the long-wished-for insight. Though we thought at first that it was a hopeless case, after several minutes' steady exercise of the divine faculty, our prospects began steadily to brighten, and we were ready to exclaim with the blind bard of "Paradise Lost and Regained,"-- "Hail, holy Light! offspring of Heaven first-born, Or of the Eternal coeternal beam May I express thee unblamed?" A little longer, and a chimney rushed red on our sight. In short, when our vision had grown familiar with the darkness, we discovered that there were some stones and some loose wads of wool on the floor, and an empty fireplace at the further end; but it was not supplied with matches, or straw, or hay, that we could see, nor "accommodated with a bench." Indeed, it was the wreck of all cosmical beauty there within. Turning our backs on the outward world, we thus looked through the knot-hole into the Humane house, into the very bowels of mercy; and for bread we found a stone. It was literally a great cry (of sea-mews outside), and a little wool. However, we were glad to sit outside, under the lee of the Humane house, to escape the piercing wind; and there we thought how cold is charity! how inhumane humanity! This, then, is what charity hides! Virtues antique and far away, with ever a rusty nail over the latch; and very difficult to keep in repair, withal, it is so uncertain whether any will ever gain the beach near you. So we shivered round about, not being able to get into it, ever and anon looking through the knot-hole into that night without a star, until we concluded that it was not a humane house at all, but a seaside box, now shut up, belonging to some of the family of Night or Chaos, where they spent their summers by the sea, for the sake of the sea-breeze, and that it was not proper for us to be prying into their concerns.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My dwelling was small, and I could hardly entertain an echo in it; but it seemed larger for being a single apartment and remote fr...om neighbors. All the attractions of a house were concentrated in one room; it was kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping-room; and whatever satisfaction parent or child, master or servant, derive from living in a house, I enjoyed it all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We all bear traces of the starvation struggle which for so long made up the life of the race. Our very organism holds memories and... glimpses of that long life of our ancestors which still goes on among so many of our contemporaries. Nothing so deadens the sympathies and shrivels the power of enjoyment as the persistent keeping away from the great opportunities for helpfulness and a continual ignoring of the starvation struggle which makes up the life of at least half the race. To shut one's self away from that half of the race life is to shut one's self away from the most vital part of it; it is to live out but half the humanity to which we have been born heir.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[The Settlement House] must be grounded in a philosophy whose foundation is on the solidarity of the human race, a philosophy whic...h will not waver when the race happens to be represented by a drunken woman or an idiot boy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The women who take husbands not out of love but out of greed, to get their bills paid, to get a fine house and clothes and jewels;... the women who marry to get out of a tiresome job, or to get away from disagreeable relatives, or to avoid being called an old maid--these are whores in everything but name. The only difference between them and my girls is that my girls gave a man his money's worth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »