Mary Heaton Vorse Quotes

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

All the laws made for the betterment of workers' lives have their origin with the workers. Hours are shortened,wages go up, conditions are better----only if the workers protest

This philosophy of hate, of religious and racial intolerance, with its passionate urge toward war, is loose in the world. It is the enemy of democracy; it is the enemy of all the fruitful and spiritual sides of life. It is our responsibility, as individuals and organizations, to resist this.

When a new idea assaults the power of established authority, authority always screams out that morality has been affronted. It makes no difference if this idea is that the world is round or that women should vote or that the workers should control industry.

If we grow old wisely, we lay aside the senseless forms and meaningless conventions of society and go back to a more primitive mode of social intercourse, picking our friends the way children do, - because we like them, - spending time enough with them to get some real good out of them.

any peace movement must have behind it a higher passion than the desire for war.

I am trying for nothing so hard in my own personal life as how not to be respectable when married.

In the last analysis civilization itself is measured by the way in which children will live and what chance they will have in the world

We can always find noble reasons for what we want to do.

I had never before seen my friends come in beaten, their heads laid open, their noses broken, or seen them jailed for peaceably demonstrating that they wanted work. I had only known how workers lived. Now I was face to face with what our society did to workers who could get no work.

What if all the forces of society were bent upon developing [poor] children? What if society's business were making people insteadof profits? How much of their creative beauty of spirit would remain unquenched through the years? How much of this responsiveness would follow them through life?

It was the spirit of the workers that was dangerous. The tired, gray crowds ebbing and flowing perpetually into the mills had waked and opened their mouths to sing.

English audiences of working people are like an instrument that responds to the player. Thought ripples up and down them, and if in some heart the speaker strikes a dissonance there is a swift answer. Always the voice speaks from gallery or pit, the terrible voice which detaches itself in every English crowd, full of caustic wit, full of irony or, maybe, approval.

Gathering news in Russia was like mining coal with a hat pin.

... peace is a militant thing ... any peace movement must have behind it a higher passion than the desire for war. No one can be a pacifist without being ready to fight for peace and die for peace.

We all marry strangers. All men are strangers to all women.

... no one knows anything about a strike until he has seen it break down into its component parts of human beings.