We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one ...is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. I am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may sometime get up again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say--I never ran my trai...n off the track and I never lost a passenger.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An actor rides in a bus or railroad train; he sees a movement and applies it to a new role. A woman in agony of spirit might turn ...her head just so; a man in deep humiliation probably would wring his hands in such a way. From straws like these, drawn from completely different sources, the fabric of a character may be built. The whole garment in which the actor hides himself is made of small externals of observation fitted to his conception of a role.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we think back to our forefathers, with their sedentary lives of forest-chopping, railroad-building, fortune-founding, their f...ox-hunting and Indian taming, their prancing about in the mazurka and the polka, with their coattails flying and their bustles bouncing, to say nothing of their all-day sessions with the port and straight bourbon,... we must realize that we are a nation, not of neurasthenics, but of sissies and slow-motion sports.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When you are waiting for a train, don't keep perpetually looking to see if it is coming. The time of its arrival is the business o...f the conductor, not yours. It will not come any sooner for all your nervous glances and your impatient pacing, and you will save strength if you will keep quiet. After we discover that the people who sit still on a long railroad journey reach that journey's end at precisely the same time as those who "fuss" continually, we have a valuable piece of information which we should not fail to put to practical use.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The worst enemy of good government is not our ignorant foreign voter, but our educated domestic railroad president, our prominent ...business man, our leading lawyer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Here stands the row of enormous stelæ that have furnished the date that links the Mayan calendar to ours. These stones standing g...rimly in line, swelling with the enormous strength of their halfobliterated carvings, still give you, through all the confusion of races and empires long dead, of languages and writings that can never be understood, a feeling of serene order and form... so that after seeing them, the railroad and the guns and the overseers and the loading sheds and the uptodate malaria hospital, all the carefully organized machinery for efficiently squeezing...the sweat and blood of the yellow brown and white mongrel race of workers who live in the rows of company shacks...seems feeble and flabby, not organization at all, not order at all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Slavery is no scholar, no improver; it does not love the whistle of the railroad; it does not love the newspaper, the mail-bag, a ...college, a book or a preacher who has the absurd whim of saying what he thinks; it does not increase the white population; it does not improve the soil; everything goes to decay.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let a man attain the highest and broadest culture that any American has possessed, then let him die by sea-storm, railroad collisi...on, or other accident, and all America will acquiesce that the best thing has happened to him; that, after the education has gone far, such is the expensiveness of America, that the best use to put a fine person to is to drown him to save his board.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »