The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

I had never before seen my friends come in beaten, their heads laid open, their noses broken, or seen them jailed for peaceably demonstrating that they wanted work. I had only known how workers lived. Now I was face to face with what our society did to workers who could get no work.

If we grow old wisely, we lay aside the senseless forms and meaningless conventions of society and go back to a more primitive mode of social intercourse, picking our friends the way children do, - because we like them, - spending time enough with them to get some real good out of them.

In the last analysis civilization itself is measured by the way in which children will live and what chance they will have in the world

... no one knows anything about a strike until he has seen it break down into its component parts of human beings.

Gathering news in Russia was like mining coal with a hat pin.

What if all the forces of society were bent upon developing [poor] children? What if society's business were making people insteadof profits? How much of their creative beauty of spirit would remain unquenched through the years? How much of this responsiveness would follow them through life?