"Unearned" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... system as the best and most practical means of cooerdinating human effort. What spoils it is the large indigestible lumps of unearned money that, because of laws that originated in special privilege, are injected into the body politic, by ...
— 21 • Frank Crane
... started down the street. As soon as the judge had disappeared, Billy beckoned to his friends, who speedily overtook him. When the party turned the corner of Front Street and were safely out of sight of Judge Straight's office, the capitalist entered the grocery store and invested his unearned increment in gingerbread. When the ensuing saturnalia was over, Billy finished the game of marbles which the judge had interrupted, and then set out to execute his commission. He had nearly reached his objective point when ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... based upon the evidence obtained. Therefore when I met his name in connection with this case I felt warranted in assuming he was the "promoter" of it. The use of his name was not forgery. He was deprived by it of nothing except, perhaps, an "unearned increment." ...
— Between the Lines - Secret Service Stories Told Fifty Years After • Henry Bascom Smith
... steam and exhaust. They wisely chose the latter course. Prosperity came to the town. The man sold his small bit of real estate for something under a hundred thousand. He didn't stay to divide his unearned increment among his fellow agitators. He hied him to retire to the land where "the flag was a bloody rag." This, of course, proves nothing for or against Socialism as a system. There was a Judas among the ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... constant as those at their own fireside. The broad windows gave streaming panorama of town and country, hill and river, and the young wife accepted it all with the haughty air of one who is wearied with splendor, but inwardly the knowledge that it all came to Haney (as to her) unearned troubled her. Luck was his God, but she, while accepting from him these marvellous, shining gifts, had another God—one derived from her Saxon ancestors, one to whom ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... led away. Fifty thousand pounds, properly invested, is only two thousand a year. When you have deducted the income-tax—and the tax on unearned income is extremely ...
— First Plays • A. A. Milne
... the life of Windy McPherson. For years he had wondered why some sensible solid person like Valmore or Wildman did not rise, and in a matter-of-fact way tell the world that no such thing as the Civil War had ever been fought, that it was merely a figment in the minds of pompous old men demanding unearned glory of their fellows. Now hurrying along the street with burning cheeks, he decided that after all there must have been such a war. He had had the same feeling about birthplaces and there could be no doubt ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... have come to me one or two times, dear, when I dared a little of the labor of things, and drank a drop or two of the wine of the spirit; and those times have lived to haunt me and make me at least not a happy man in my unearned ease. There come to me still just once in a while hours when I get sight of the gleam, hours that make me loathe all that in my hours of comfort I loved; and there comes over me then a kind of Titanic rage, ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... polemical pamphlet is, "Beware of the intoxication of success." When the whole of Germany was delirious with joy over her victory, at a time when the unquestioned triumph of her arms tended rather to reflect unearned glory upon every department of her social organisation, it required both courage and discernment to raise the warning voice and to apply the wet blanket. But Nietzsche did both, and with spirit, because his worst fears ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... In view of this general recreancy and treason to the principles that our fathers established by the sword—having in constant observation this almost universal hospitality to the solemn nonsense of hereditary rank and unearned distinction, my faith in practical realization of republican ideals is small, and I falter in the work of their maintenance in the interest of a people for whom they are too good. Seeing that we are immune to ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... vast, giant aggregate which we call a trust fund. I see it is appealing to you. It could not be otherwise. Now, with this aggregate, you, and I, and everyone can own vast estates, buy forty-year debentures, lend money on approved security, buy real estate, the unearned increment of which will net in some cases two or three hundred per cent. interest, besides an increased valuation ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... years. He had learned that if he wanted to marry Charity he must persuade her over into New Jersey. It did not please Jim to have to follow the example of Zada and Cheever, and it hit him as a peculiar cruelty that he and Charity had to accept not only an unearned increment of scandal in the verdict of divorce, but also a marriage contrary to the ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... this paradox. The field has for many years lain idle in the midst of a growing town because of a flaw in the title, and when eventually the title is quieted and the land is sold it pours wealth upon heads not educated to use it with wisdom. Here is unearned increment made flesh and converted into drama: the field that might have been home and garden and playground becomes a machine, a monster, which gradually visits evil upon all concerned. Then Adelle and her proletarian cousin, aware ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... drama flat, but matrimony was a successful institution before the Circuit Theater was built, and a husband has rights. I intend to cure you of the work habit. You must learn to scorn it. Look at me. I'm an example of the unearned increment. We'll kiss this dinky flat a fond farewell—it's impossible, really—I refuse to share such a dark secret with you. To-morrow we leave it for the third and last time. What d'you say to the sunny side of the Ritz until we decide ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... left. He wore the same shirt the year 'round, slept with his dogs and invested his groschens in such Manhattan dirt as he could conveniently transport upon his person. Thus he enabled his aristocratic descendants to wax so fat on "unearned increment" that some of them must forswear their fealty to Uncle Sam and seek in Yewrup a society whose rough edges will not scratch the varnish off their culchah. Mrs. Bradley-Martin does not exactly "look every inch ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... a quarter-past nine this evening she that was the life of my life passed to the relief and the peace of death, after twenty-two months of unjust and unearned suffering. I first saw her thirty-seven years ago, and now I have looked upon her face for the last time.... I was full of remorse for things done and said in these thirty- four years of married life that ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... verse-form—if these may be taken as the equipment of a poet, nearly all of this volume is poetry. And if to the sum of these be added the indescribable increment of charm which comes occasionally to the work of some poet, quite unearned by any of these catalogued qualities of his, you have a fair measure of Mr. Noyes at his best.... Two considerations render Mr. Noyes interesting above most poets: the wonderful degree in which the personal charm ...
— The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays • William B. Yeats
... produce anything for society? Does it perform a function for which our ideal administration would think it necessary to pay? I buy some railway stock at 110. A year or two later I seize a favourable opportunity and sell it at 125. Is the increment earned or unearned? The answer in the single case is clear, but it may be said that my good fortune in this case may be balanced by ill luck in another. No doubt. But, to go no further, if on balance I make a fortune or an income by this method it would seem to ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... depriving him of the opportunity of earning both appetite and good digestion by honest toil. So he resorts to condiments and ragouts, palate-tickling and tongue-tickling sauces and nerve-rousing stimulants, as a means of securing the unearned felicity of ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 13th Annual Meeting - Rochester, N.Y. September, 7, 8 and 9, 1922 • Various
... "goddess who determineth all aright,—bless thou this land, though it wakes to call me traitor. Teach it to know I am innocent. Comfort Hermione, my wife. And restore me to Athens, after doing deeds which wipe out all my unearned shame!" ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... the contents of the will beforehand. In fact, he had helped his old friend in his decisions. Nor had Alec's position been decided upon without his advice. These two men understood the boy too well to chance helping to spoil his life by an ample, unearned provision. They knew the weak streak in his character, and had decided to give him a chance, by the process of time, to obtain that balance which might befit him for the responsibility ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... lands, France, England and the Netherlands that, feeling the impulses from all sides, evolved the sanest and strongest synthesis. While Germany almost committed suicide with the sword of the spirit, while Italy sank into a voluptuous torpor of decadent art, while Spain reeled under the load of unearned Western wealth, France, England and Holland, taking a little from each of their neighbors, and not too much from any, became strong, well-balanced, brilliant states. But if eventually Germany, Italy and Spain all suffered from over-specialization, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... personal risk and hardship and bereavement to the members of that caste. But the capitalist who has shares in explosives and cannons and soldiers' boots runs no risk and suffers no hardship; whilst as to the investor pure and simple, all that happens to him is that he finds the unearned income obtainable on Government security larger than ever. Victory to the capitalists of Europe means that they can not only impose on the enemy a huge indemnity, but lend him the money to pay it with whilst the working classes produce and pay both ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... attached to the deed by Muanzanza. Among the Bakwains he would have been punished. My men would have stripped him of the wages which he wore on his person, but thought that, as we had always acted on the mildest principles, they would let him move off with his unearned gains. ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... myself, most unwillingly, a cause of annoyance to Victoria, and a pretext for her repression. Importance flowed in on me unasked, unearned. To speak in homely fashion, she was always "a bad second," and none save herself attributed to her the normal status of privileges of an elder sister. Her wrath was not visited on me, but on those who exalted ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... Insurance: definition and kinds. The large element of luck in industry due to unavoidable chances has something of the same evil character as gambling. It brings unearned prizes to some and to others unmerited losses. It must therefore be a benefit to the community, if this element of unavoidable chance cannot be reduced as a whole, at least to regularize it and make it exactly calculable ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... spent by his Department this year. But let no one mistake him for a mere HORNE of Plenty, pouring out benefits indiscriminately upon the genuine unemployed and the work-shy. He has already deprived some seventeen thousand potential domestics of their unearned increment, and he promises ruthless prosecution of all who try to cheat ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... thing. I paid fifty thousand for your ranch as soon as I found you had no title. I had just about that much income accumulated at my banker's while I've been herding sheep down here, so it was almost like picking the thing up on a bargain-counter for a penny. There's another little surplus of unearned increment piling up there, 'Tave. I've been thinking of a wedding trip in a yacht with white ribbons tied to the mast, through the Mediterranean, and then up among the Hebrides and down ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry |
