Tom Jones Quotes

I'm lucky to have football. My father was 16 when he worked in the mines. That's practically a child, going down the mines.

Fiction about mining has a long tradition - Emile Zola's 'Germinal' and Upton Sinclair's 'King Coal' come to mind - and most readers will be aware of the industry's harsh conditions.

The present miner has had his day; he has been oppressed and ground down and denied the right to live as a human being; but there is another generation coming up, a generation of little children prematurely doomed to the whirl of the mill and the soot and the noise and the blackness of the breaker. It is for them that we are fighting.

I’m not going to go down in coal mines like Mrs. Roosevelt.

My grandfather, who brought me up, was a coal miner. I visited the mines with him. I remember it vividly. It was horrible. I'm glad I didn't go into the family business.

He described how, as a boy of 14, his dad had been down the mining pit, his uncle had been down the pit, his brother had been down the pit, and of course he would go down the pit.

My father and brothers were coal miners.

Being in a Chinese coal mine for 30 years is like an epic novel. It's tragic.

It would be possible to say without exaggeration that the miners' leaders were the stupidest men in England if we had not frequent occasion to meet the owners.

Late 19th-century America was basically a plutocratic enterprise while people toiled in mines and died of coal dust poisoning.

When I swapped studying for a wage and a proper job, Mam and Dad were devastated. I was rejecting an opportunity they never had. But their eldest son, at 16, wanted only to follow his father down the pit. It was to be the biggest education of my life.

I make films about working class people.

The industrial revolution has tended to produce everywhere great urban masses that seem to be increasingly careless of ethical standards.

I've commissioned an adaptation of 'The Jungle', by Upton Sinclair, a story of a young immigrant from Lithuania to the meat-packing industry of Chicago in 1904, and the rise of the unions in America.

The business manager was doing fine back in his office while they were out on the line, hungry. And, so they started to see a lot of that and there was, that maybe the leadership had its own cause. More so than the miners, you know, it was like a power struggle.

When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation.

I come from a coal-mining, working-class background. My father was a coal miner.

I am the granddaughter of a Welsh coal miner who was determined that his kids get out of the mines. My dad got his first job when he was six years old, in a little village in Wales called Nantyffyllon, cleaning bottles at the Colliers Arms.

Journalists were at the forefront. From the Civil War until the early 1900s, nothing was being done to solve the problems of the Industrial Age.

An unskilled middle-aged man can work in the mines, and it pays well.

My wife and I, unlike many intellectuals, spent five years working on assembly lines. We came to fully understand the criticisms of the industrial age, in which you are an appendage of a machine that sets the pace.

I was anxious to save the great coal operators and all of the class of big propertied men, of which they were members, from the dreadful punishment which their own folly would have brought on them if I had not acted.

With the laborers of England generally, does not the moral coercion of want subject their will as despotically to that of their employer, as the physical constraint does the soldier, the seaman, or the slave?

In size and population Manchester is the second city in the United Kingdom, containing above four-score thousand inhabitants. Imagine this multitude crowded together in narrow streets, the houses all built of brick and blackened with smoke; frequent buildings among them as large as convents ... where you hear from within ... the everlasting din of machinery; and where, when the bell rings, it is to call wretches to their work instead of to their prayers…. if Dante had peopled one of his hells with children, here was a scene worthy to have supplied him with new images of torment

The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester