Workhouse Quotes

1. "During my incarceration Mother visited me. She had in some way managed to leave the workhouse and was making an effort to establish a home for us. Her presence was like a bouquet of flowers; she looked so fresh and lovely that I felt ashamed of my unkempt appearance and my shaved iodined head.‘You must excuse his dirty face,' said the nurse.Mother laughed, and how well I remember her endearing words as she hugged and kissed me: ‘With all thy dirt I love thee still."
Author: Charles Chaplin

2. "And what an example of the power of dress young Oliver Twist was! Wrapped in the blanket which had hitherto formed his only covering, he might have been the child of a nobleman or a beggar;—it would have been hard for the haughtiest stranger to have fixed his station in society. But now he was enveloped in the old calico robes, that had grown yellow in the same service; he was badged and ticketed, and fell into his place at once—a parish child—the orphan of a workhouse—the humble, half-starved drudge—to be cuffed and buffeted through the world, despised by all, and pitied by none."
Author: Charles Dickens

3. "Lawyers enjoy a little mystery, you know. Why, if everybody came forward and told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth straight out, we should all retire to the workhouse."
Author: Dorothy L. Sayers

4. "Everyone in the Chinese economic world knows that the country is not going to move out of cheap-workhouse status, toward the realm of 'real' rich-country corporate power and prosperity, unless (among other changes) it begins removing these price distortions."
Author: James Fallows

5. "It was among farmers and potato diggers and old men in workhouses and beggars at my own door that I found what was beyond these and yet farther beyond that drawingroom poet of my childhood in the expression of love, and grief, and the pain of parting, that are the disclosure of the individual soul."
Author: Lady Gregory

6. "How could the wind be so strong, so far inland, that cyclistscoming into the town in the late afternoon looked more likesailors in peril? This was on the way into Cambridge, up MillRoad past the cemetery and the workhouse. On the openground to the left the willow-trees had been blown, drivenand cracked until their branches gave way and lay about thedrenched grass, jerking convulsively and trailing cataracts oftwigs. The cows had gone mad, tossing up the silvery weepingleaves which were suddenly, quite contrary to all their exper-ience, everywhere within reach. Their horns were festoonedwith willow boughs. Not being able to see properly, theytripped and fell. Two or three of them were wallowing ontheir backs, idiotically, exhibiting vast pale bellies intended bynature to be always hidden. They were still munching. A sceneof disorder, tree-tops on the earth, legs in the air, in a universitycity devoted to logic and reason."
Author: Penelope Fitzgerald

7. "What do we see by [our enlightened age] which our ancestors saw not, and which at the same time is worth seeing? We see a hundred men hanged, where they saw one. We see five hundred transported, where they saw one. We see five thousand in the workhouse, where they saw one. . . . We see children perishing in manufactories, where they saw them flourishing in the fields. We see prisons, where they saw castles. We see masters, where they saw representatives. In short, they saw true men, where we see false knaves. They saw Milton, and we see Mr. Sackbut."
Author: Thomas Love Peacock

8. "Oh, my dear fellow, if you want to be a gentleman you must give up being an artist. They've got nothing to do with one another. You hear of men painting pot-boilers to keep an aged mother – well, it shows they're excellent sons, but it's no excuse for bad work. They're only tradesmen. An artist would let his mother go to the workhouse."
Author: W. Somerset Maugham

9. "Is the prison that Mr. Scoundrel lives in at the end of his career a more uncomfortable place than the workhouse that Mr. Honesty lives in at the end of HIS career?"
Author: Wilkie Collins

Workhouse Quotes Pictures