Richard Shilling Quotes

They weren’t all Nixon supporters, either: self-described enemies were on hand, too. “Every generation needs somebody to hate, and he was ours,” said Richard Shilling, a computer programmer. “He politicized us, he incited us, he defined our cause. No one can ever take his place.

To assure Sabbath observance in the Connecticut colony, the General Court required in 1668 that constables in every town “make search after all offenders.” The ruling specified that anyone who “shall keep out of the meeting house during the public worship unnecessarily, there being convenient room in the house,” would pay five shillings for each offense or sit in the stocks one hour. Not everyone in Lyme complied. Two years later the county court in New London heard “the complaint of the constable of Lyme concerning Mr. and Mrs. Ely, their profanation of the Sabbath and also contempt of authority.” The clerk summoned Richard Ely (1610–1684) together with his wife and “ye Negro servant Moses” to appear at the next court session in June 1670 to answer the charges.

I come from the lower orders, that is understood by all. Not the lowest; you’d have to go back to my grandfather for the lowest. He was a night-soil remover, did you know that, Sam? One shilling per stinking cesspit. Did you know that they set me to working with him when I was a boy? One summer I chucked it, ran to the countryside, hid in a hay mow. Farmer found me in the morning, took pity, let me stay. Let me work with him and his dogs, tending his sheep. It was bliss. I never loved anything like I loved them dogs. Then my father showed up and dragged me home. Why? He didn’t want me. “Never mind. You could say my father’s rise to running his own public house was nothing short of a miracle, really. And then I went and edged up a rung from him, didn’t I, when I became a constable. Promoted to detective. Then chief of detectives. Still and all, I got about as high as I could possibly go, given what I come from. And that ain’t particular high. Just ask Sir Richard Mayne, commissioner of the Metropolitan, if you’re unsure of that.” Llewellyn sighed deeply and shook his head. “You seem impatient, Mr. Llewellyn. Am I keeping you?” Field poured the last of the whiskey into his glass. “Now, forget my old man. Forget the night-soil remover. Start over. Say I come from a monkey. And so did you. And Commissioner Mayne—him, too.” He looked around the tavern. “And so did every bleeding body on the whole earth come from monkeys, and those monkeys come from God knows what—fish? Worms? Who benefits, Sam? Who gets hurt? Who likes it, and who don’t?” Llewellyn shrugged. “I’ll tell you who don’t like it: the merchants who run the bleeding empire don’t like it, not one bit. It puts every man on the same level as them, see? The rich, the poor, the light-skinned, and the dark. The bishops don’t like it, nor the lords, because if Mr. Darwin has his way, where’s the control? Who’s in charge, who’s on top and who’s not? Bad for business, Mr. Darwin’s notions are. But for blokes like me and you? Well, even a policeman can dream, can’t he? It’s not flattering, perhaps, having an orangutan as your forefather, but there’s a kind of hope in it, don’t you see? Last I checked, there weren’t no quality monkeys, nor were there lower-class ones.” “And?” “Crash, boom, Mr. Darwin brings it all down. Rule Britannia and the lot. Brings it down harder and more thorough than Mr. Marx ever dreamt in his darkest revolutionary dream.

White bought a pound of dry rushes for one shilling and counted 1,600 stems. Enough grease to prepare them—six pounds—cost two shillings more. White timed one of these rushlights: it burned for fifty-seven minutes. If his sixteen hundred rushes averaged only a half hour each, he calculated, “then a poor man will purchase eight hundred hours of light, a time exceeding thirty-three entire days, for three shillings. . . . An experienced old housekeeper assures me that one pound and a half of rushes completely supplies his family the year round,

During the depression, people fought each other for boxes of groceries and if you were lucky you might get a few shillings for fighting six rounds. When Jack Johnson was World Heavyweight Champ, back in the early 1900s, Hartlepool had a brilliant boxer called Jasper Carter. People today will never have heard of him, but almost 100 years ago he put Hartlepool on the fistic map.

Robert Hooke, who is perhaps best remembered now as the first person to describe a cell, and the great and stately Sir Christopher Wren, who was actually an astronomer first and architect second, though that is not often generally remembered now. In 1683, Halley, Hooke, and Wren were dining in London when the conversation turned to the motions of celestial objects. It was known that planets were inclined to orbit in a particular kind of oval known as an ellipse—“a very specific and precise curve,” to quote Richard Feynman—but it wasn’t understood why. Wren generously offered a prize worth forty shillings (equivalent to a couple of weeks’ pay) to whichever of the men could provide a solution.