"The New York Magazine Environmental Teach-In" by Elizabeth Barlow in New York Magazine (30 March 1970), p. 30 http://books.google.com/books?id=cccDAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover#PPA30,M1
1970s
Context: We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.
“Nay interference has begun: there are already Factory Inspectors,—who seem to have no lack of work. Perhaps there might be Mine-Inspectors too:—might there not be Furrowfield Inspectors withal, and ascertain for us how on seven and sixpence a week a human family does live! Interference has begun; it must continue, must extensively enlarge itself, deepen and sharpen itself. Such things cannot longer be idly lapped in darkness, and suffered to go on unseen: the Heavens do see them; the curse, not the blessing of the Heavens is on an Earth that refuses to see them.”
1840s, Past and Present (1843)
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Thomas Carlyle 481
Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian… 1795–1881Related quotes
“By George!" cried the inspector. "How did you ever see that?"
Because I looked for it.”
Source: The Adventure of the Dancing Men
Source: The Principles of Philosophy
“See also An Inspector Calls, I Have Been Here Before and Time and the Conways.”
2010s, 2015, Address to the United States Congress (March 2015)
“It is a job of a police inspector to monitor it.”
PTI in: Chandrashekhar - A firebrand idealist http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Chandrashekhar--A-firebrand-idealist/articleshow/2185870.cms?referral=PM, The Times of India, 8 July 2007
When asked about the progress of investigations into the Bofors arms deal scandal involving the previous government of Congress functionaries.
In support of the Danish participation in the invasion of Iraq http://consortiumnews.com/2014/07/09/nyt-protects-the-fogh-machine/ (2003)
T. S. Eliot in the Sunday Times, 1952; cited from David Chinitz T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) p. 56
Criticism