Famous quotes containing the words poor, law and/or system:
“In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“The basis of good manners is self-reliance. Necessity is the law of all who are not self-possessed.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“The system was breaking down. The one who had wandered alone past so many happenings and events began to feel, backing up along the primal vein that led to his center, the beginning of hiccup that would, if left to gather, explode the center to the extremities of life, the suburbs through which one makes ones way to where the country is.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)