Grub Street Hacks

Famous quotes containing the words grub street, grub, street and/or hacks:

    O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee,
    Whose graceless children scorn to own thee!
    ... Yet thou hast greater cause to be
    Ashamed of them, than they of thee.
    Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)

    The Anglo-American can indeed cut down, and grub up all this waving forest, and make a stump speech, and vote for Buchanan on its ruins, but he cannot converse with the spirit of the tree he fells, he cannot read the poetry and mythology which retire as he advances. He ignorantly erases mythological tablets in order to print his handbills and town-meeting warrants on them.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    When I pass people on the street I want to stop them and say, listen, I got a fella.
    Sydney Carroll, U.S. screenwriter, and Robert Rossen. Sarah (Piper Laurie)

    In literary circles, the men of trust and consideration, bookmakers, editors, university deans and professors, bishops, too, were by no means men of the largest literary talent, but usually of a low and ordinary intellectuality, with a sort of mercantile activity and working talent. Indifferent hacks and mediocrities tower, by pushing their forces to a lucrative point, or by working power, over multitudes of superior men, in Old as in New England.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)