Bob Cratchit Quotes

And how did little Tim behave?” asked Mrs Cratchit, when she had rallied Bob on his credulity and Bob had hugged his daughter to his heart’s content. “As good as gold,” said Bob, “and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.

There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn’t believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration. Eked out by apple-sauce and mashed potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family; indeed, as Mrs. Cratchit said with great delight (surveying one small atom of a bone upon the dish), they hadn’t ate it all at last!

name. “Mr. Scrooge!” said Bob; “I’ll give you Mr. Scrooge, the Founder of the Feast!” “The Founder of the Feast indeed!” cried Mrs. Cratchit, reddening. “I wish I had him here. I’d give him a piece of my mind to feast upon, and I hope he’d have a good appetite for it.

My dear,” was Bob’s mild answer, “Christmas Day.” “I’ll drink his health for your sake and the Day’s,” said Mrs. Cratchit, “not for his. Long life to him! A merry Christmas and a happy New Year!—he’ll be very merry and very happy, I have no doubt!

For generations, work – for all but a privileged elite – meant a form of servitude. Employees were supplicants without rights or protection – Bob Cratchits reliant on the goodwill of their bosses to secure a day off or a pay rise. But over the past century a revolution has taken place in the control people have over their working lives. In the west, jobs have become part of an assumed right to self-actualisation. By this creed, a job is part of who we are and we are entitled not simply to a salary but also to satisfaction. The

Only twenty-seven people in Britain can explain why the day after Christmas Day is called Boxing Day, but that doesn't stop millions from marking it by staying home from work. An intriguing side effect of thus having two consecutive public holidays is that no matter what days of the week they fall on, the British can easily justify taking the whole week off. Suppose Christmas Day falls on a Tuesday, with Boxing Day on the Wednesday. Well, then, what is the point, the contemporary Bob Cratchit cries, of bother to open up the office or factory on Monday, when we all plan to knock off work by lunchtime because it's Christmas Eve? And it's hardly worth cranking up the heat for a working week that's now been whittled down to just two days. By the time we finish complaining about our ingrate in-laws and the cheesy Christmas television programs and the blatant materialism of our kids, it's time to go home for the weekend. Isn't it simpler for Mr. Scrooge to close the countinghouse until the New Year? (He can still pay us, of course.) This creative logic is a little more challenging when Christmas Day is a Thursday, but several Plumley residents had pulled it off...

It is commonplace to note that the Homo economicus model, so defi ned, does not accurately describe human agents. Like Homo economicus, we have preferences. Unlike Homo economicus, we have preferences directly relating to the welfare of others. Some may regard this as controversial. Psychological egoism is the thesis that all human behavior is purely self-regarding. Responding to obvious counterexamples, defenders of psychological egoism sometimes say we act in apparently other-regarding ways only because we reap “psychic” rewards from helping others. As philosophers well know, psychological egoism thus embellished becomes airtight at a cost of becoming literally inconsequential. It does not tell us that soldiers will never give their lives for their countries or that people will never make anonymous donations to charity. It does not predict that Ebenezer Scrooge will never buy Bob Cratchit a Christmas turkey. It offers no testable predictions. Instead, it avoids having false implications by having no implications whatsoever. It merely expresses a determination to stretch the concept of self-regard as far as necessary to fi t all behavior, no matter how diverse observed behavior actually turns out to be. Insofar as there is any real content to the claim that we get psychic rewards from helping others, we can admit that, of course, we tend to feel good about helping others. But this fact does not begin to suggest that our real objective is psychic benefit rather than other people’s welfare. On the contrary, there can be no psychic reward for helping others unless we care about others. Imagine Bob helping someone across the street and then saying to her, “Other things equal, I would rather you had been hit by a bus. Unfortunately, helping you is the price I have to pay in order to reap psychic rewards.” The fact that we get psychic rewards from helping others proves we are directly concerned with the welfare of others. The mark of a purely self-regarding person is not that he really wants to help others but rather that he really doesn’t. That is the obvious and much celebrated difference between Homo economicus and us.

Only twenty-seven people in Britain can explain why the day after Christmas Day is called Boxing Day, but that doesn't stop millions from marking it by staying home from work. An intriguing side effect of thus having two consecutive public holidays is that no matter what days of the week they fall on, the British can easily justify taking the whole week off. Suppose Christmas Day falls on a Tuesday, with Boxing Day on the Wednesday. Well, then, what is the point, the contemporary Bob Cratchit cries, of bother to open up the office or factory on Monday, when we all plan to knock off work by lunchtime because it's Christmas Eve? And it's hardly worth cranking up the heat for a working week that's now been whittled down to just two days. By the time we finish complaining about our ingrate in-laws and the cheesy Christmas television programs and the blatant materialism of our kids, it's time to go home for the weekend. Isn't it simpler for Mr. Scrooge to close the countinghouse until the New Year? (He can still pay us, of course.) This creative logic is a little more challenging when Christmas Day is a Thursday, but several Plumley residents had pulled it off...

He was a man who approved of happy endings. In life itself, you didn't get the chance to choose an ending; but of a writer could give Bob Cratchit a Merry Christmas, then that's what the writer should do.