How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York 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.

Forty per cent. of the distress among the poor, said a recent official report, is due to drunkenness. But the first legislative committee ever appointed to probe this sore went deeper down and uncovered its roots.

The sweater knows well that the isolation of the workman in his helpless ignorance is his sure foundation, and he has done what he could--with merciless severity where he could--to smother every symptom of awakening intelligence in his slaves.

But I have not set out to write the political history of New York.

The world forgets easily, too easily, what it does not like to remember.

The danger to society comes not from the poverty of the tenements, but from the ill-spent wealth that reared them, that it might earn a usurious interest from a class from which "nothing else was expected."

I know of but one bridge that will carry us over safe, a bridge founded upon justice and built of human hearts.

Enough has been said to show that model tenements can be built successfully and made to pay in New York, if the owner will be content with the five or six per cent.