Jacob A. Riis quotes

Long ago it was said that "one half of the world does not know how the other half lives." That was true then. It did not know because it did not care.

In self-defence, you know, all life eventually accommodates itself to its environment, and human life is no exception.

Oh, God! that bread should be so dear, And flesh and blood so cheap!

When another generation shall have doubled the census of our city, and to that vast army of workers, held captive by poverty, the very name of home shall be as a bitter mockery, what will the harvest be?

Were the question raised who makes the most of life thus mortgaged, who resists most stubbornly its levelling tendency--knows how to drag even the barracks upward a part of the way at least toward the ideal plane of the home--the palm must be unhesitatingly awarded the Teuton. The Italian and the poor Jew rise only by compulsion. The Chinaman does not rise at all; here, as at home, he simply remains stationary.

Take a look into this Roosevelt Street alley; just about one step wide, with a five-story house on one side that gets its light and air--God help us for pitiful mockery!--from this slit between brick walls.

The people who live there come to look upon death in a different way from the rest of us--do not take it as hard.

Never was change more urgently needed.

Granted, that the Chinese are in no sense a desirable element of the population, that they serve no useful purpose here, whatever they may have done elsewhere in other days, yet to this it is a sufficient answer that they are here, and that, having let them in, we must make the best of it.

The readiness of the poor to share what little they have with those who have even less is one of the few moral virtues of the tenements.