Sinclair Living Single Quotes

When we see salvation whole, its every single part is found in Christ, And so we must beware lest we derive the smallest drop from somewhere else.

About a block away from them there lived another Lithuanian family, consisting of an elderly widow and one grown son; their name was Majauszkis, and our friends struck up an acquaintance with them before long. One evening they came over for a visit, and naturally the first subject upon which the conversation turned was the neighborhood and its history; and then Grandmother Majauszkiene, as the old lady was called, proceeded to recite to them a string of horrors that fairly froze their blood. She was a wrinkled-up and wizened personage--she must have been eighty--and as she mumbled the grim story through her toothless gums, she seemed a very old witch to them. Grandmother Majauszkiene had lived in the midst of misfortune so long that it had come to be her element, and she talked about starvation, sickness, and death as other people might about weddings and holidays. The thing came gradually. In the first place as to the house they had bought, it was not new at all, as they had supposed; it was about fifteen years old, and there was nothing new upon it but the paint, which was so bad that it needed to be put on new every year or two. The house was one of a whole row that was built by a company which existed to make money by swindling poor people. The family had paid fifteen hundred dollars for it, and it had not cost the builders five hundred, when it was new. Grandmother Majauszkiene knew that because her son belonged to a political organization with a contractor who put up exactly such houses. They used the very flimsiest and cheapest material; they built the houses a dozen at a time, and they cared about nothing at all except the outside shine. The family could take her word as to the trouble they would have, for she had been through it all--she and her son had bought their house in exactly the same way. They had fooled the company, however, for her son was a skilled man, who made as high as a hundred dollars a month, and as he had had sense enough not to marry, they had been able to pay for the house. Grandmother Majauszkiene saw that her friends were puzzled at this remark; they did not quite see how paying for the house was "fooling the company." Evidently they were very inexperienced. Cheap as the houses were, they were sold with the idea that the people who bought them would not be able to pay for them. When they failed--if it were only by a single month--they would lose the house and all that they had paid on it, and then the company would sell it over again. And did they often get a chance to do that? Dieve! (Grandmother Majauszkiene raised her hands.) They did it--how often no one could say, but certainly more than half of the time. They might ask any one who knew anything at all about Packingtown as to that; she had been living here ever since this house was built, and she could tell them all about it. And had it ever been sold before? Susimilkie! Why, since it had been built, no less than four families that their informant could name had tried to buy it and failed.

You could take seriously a president that quoted T. S. Eliot. But none do, and none ever would. No president would ever dare to say anything intelligent. There would be a revolution on the spot. The rednecks’ heads would explode. America would implode. God forbid that a president should ever say a single clever thing. All that the president is allowed to say is, “God bless America. One nation under God.” … the mantra of morons. Imagine a different America where the president said, “I think, therefore I am. … The unexamined life is not worth living. … God is dead.

Such were the cruel terms upon which their life was possible, that they might never have nor expect a single instant's respite from worry, a single instant in which they were not haunted by the thought of money. They would no sooner escape, as by a miracle, from one difficulty, than a new one would come into view. In addition to all their physical hardships, there was thus a constant strain upon their minds; they were harried all day and nearly all night by worry and fear. This was in truth not living; it was scarcely even existing, and they felt that it was too little for the price they paid. They were willing to work all the time; and when people did their best, ought they not to be able to keep alive?

Bill Gates made a convincing argument for why improving human health is money well spent, and won’t lead to overpopulation, in his 2018 video “Does Saving More Lives Lead to Overpopulation?”56 The short answer is: No. If we were to stop all deaths—every single one around the globe—right now, we would add about 150,000 people to our planet each day. That would be 55 million people each year. That might sound like a lot, but it would be less than a single percentage point. At that rate, we would add a billion people to our ranks every eighteen years, which is still considerably slower than the rate at which the last few billion people have come along and easily countered by the global decline in family sizes. It’s still an increase, but it’s not the sort of exponential growth many people fret about when they first encounter the idea of slowing aging. Recall, these calculations are what we’d face if we ended all deaths right away. And although I’m very optimistic about the prospects for prolonged vitality, I’m not that optimistic. I don’t know any reputable scientist who is.