"She was aware from her experience with the legislature in New York that labor legislation, like oysters, could be swallowed only in certain seasons, and she was prepared to work on whatever at the moment seemed most likely to succeed."
Frances Perkins was an American workers-rights advocate who served as the fourth United States secretary of labor from 1933 to 1945, the longest serving in that position. A member of the Democratic Party, Perkins was the first woman ever to serve in a presidential cabinet. As a loyal supporter of her longtime friend, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, she helped make labor issues important in the em
"She inherited part of a tradition of service. She was its caretaker for a little while, and she passed it on to another generation. ...[T]here was a timelessness and a transcendence to the quality of her work, just a natural part of the American society..."
Frances Perkins"During her lifetime, a time when women faced severe restrictions and prejudices, Frances Perkins achieved many firsts—first woman head of an industrial commission, first woman in a governors cabinet, first woman in a presidents cabinet. But never without public furor."
Frances Perkins"What she liked about [Theodore Roosevelt] were his "progressive ideas," or his ideas that everybody should get a "square deal"... not just big business owners. ...Roosevelt thought it was time for reforms—time to put some limits on big business, to drive out corrupt politicians, to provide better opportunities for working people, and to improve conditions in the cities. ..."Out of the period ...a whole generation ...emerged... who had a great passion for social justice," Perkins said years later."
Frances Perkins"During her senior year Frances... heard speak. ...[K]nown as a "raging furnace" about issues of social justice, Kelley had successfully fought to get [Illinois] laws passed... to prohibit child labor and to limit the number of hours that women worked. According to Perkins, Kelleys speech "first opened my mind to... the work which became my vocation.""
Frances Perkins"Perkins was influenced by many books that exposed horrendous situations, including s book How the Other Half Lives, an exposé... that "deeply moved" Perkins."
Frances Perkins"Despite hate mail and harsh treatment by the press, her husbands chronic mental illness, and a resolution of impeachment against her, Frances Perkins successfully fought to make life better for working people by establishing unemployment insurance, minimum wages, maximum hours, safety regulations, and Social Security."
Frances Perkins"Gentlemen, no fighting please. This is, after all, a council of war. (p. 26)"
Discworld"I should say that when people talk about capitalism its a bit of a joke. Theres no such thing. No country, no business class, has ever been willing to subject itself to the free market, free market discipline. Free markets are for others. Like, the Third World is the Third World because they had free markets rammed down their throat. Meanwhile, the enlightened states, England, the United States, others, resorted to massive state intervention to protect private power, and still do. Thats right up to the present. I mean, the Reagan administration for example was the most protectionist in post-war American history. Virtually the entire dynamic economy in the United States is based crucially on state initiative and intervention: computers, the internet, telecommunication, automation, pharmaceutical, you just name it. Run through it, and you find massive ripoffs of the public, meaning, a system in which under one guise or another the public pays the costs and takes the risks, and profit is privatized. Thats very remote from a free market. Free market is like what India had to suffer for a couple hundred years, and most of the rest of the Third World."
"The Dwarf sees farther than the Giant, when he has the Giants shoulders to mount on."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge"If civilization has an opposite, it is war."
"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"
"I am dominated by one thing, an irresistible, burning attraction towards the abstract. The expression of human feelings and the passions of man certainly interest me deeply, but I am less concerned with expressing the motions of the soul and mind than to render visible, so to speak, the inner flashes of intuition which have something divine in their apparent insignificance and reveal magic, even divine horizons, when they are transposed into the marvellous effects of pure plastic art."
Gustave Moreau