“What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better society than I had always lived in?”
The Blithedale Romance (1852)
Context: What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better society than I had always lived in? It had satisfied me well enough. My pleasant bachelor-parlor, sunny and shadowy, curtained and carpeted, with the bedchamber adjoining... my evening at the billiard club, the concert, the theatre, or at somebody's party, if I pleased - what could be better than all this? Was it better to hoe, to mow, to toil and moil amidst the accumulations of a barnyard; to be the chambermaid of two yoke of oxen and a dozen cows; to eat salt beef, and earn it with the sweat of my brow, and thereby take the tough morsel out of some wretch's mouth, into whose vocation I had thrust myself?
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Nathaniel Hawthorne 128
American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879) 1804–1864Related quotes
“What the hell has Hoover got to do with it? Anyway, I had a better year than he did.”
Oft-cited but likely apocryphal variation on Ruth's defense of his Hoover-exceeding salary demands (structurally similar, albeit in bolder, considerably more streamlined fashion, to the contemporaneously reported Ruth quote of January 7, 1930—see above); as quoted in Babe Ruth: The Big Moments of the Big Fellow http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/12/28/better-year/#return-note-10331-1 (1947) by Tom Meany, p. 139, and reproduced shortly thereafter in several book reviews, most notably an informal review http://www.mediafire.com/view/720jdsq5hh19ar1/Daley%2C%20Arthur.%20Sports%20of%20the%20Times—Something%20About%20the%20Babe.%20The%20New%20York%20Times.%20December%2016%2C%201947.jpg by New York Times columnist Arthur Daley, who would go on to resurrect the quote, with slightly altered wordings, in at least four subsequent columns, including one in August 1948 http://www.mediafire.com/view/yz5mp5zi41v3xln/Daley%2C%20Arthur.%20Sports%20of%20the%20Times—Still%20More%20on%20the%20Babe.%20The%20New%20York%20Times.%20August%2019%2C%201948.jpg and in April 1951 http://www.mediafire.com/view/h3p6wvqdso308pk/Daley%2C%20Arthur.%20Carry%20a%20Bat%20Who%2C%20a%20Ball%20Player%20The%20New%20York%20Times.%20April%2015%2C%201951.%20Section%20VI%2C%20Page%2017..jpg.
Unsourced variants: Hey, I had a better year than he did.
Why not, I had a better year than he did.
I know, but I had a better year than Hoover.
Cloak of Anarchy (p. 115)
Short fiction, Tales of Known Space (1975)
Tim Teeman, "The importance of being Childish", http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,22876-2475809.html The Times, 2006-12-02
Childish's name is the most prominent in Tracey Emin's Everyone I have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, appliquéd names in a tent (destroyed in the Momart warehouse fire).
1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), History
Context: These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and night, let us use in broad day. The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary. Thus compelled, the Muse of history will utter oracles, as never to those who do not respect themselves. I have no expectation that any man will read history aright, who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing to-day.
in interview with Carol Tavris, as cited in Love According To Harry Harlow http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/love-according-to-harry-harlow#.WE2jv33d7cs, t the Association for Psychological Science's Observer, by Deborah Blum, January 2012.
