Quotes from Jacob A. Riis

Men have a trick of coming up to what is expected of them good or bad.

When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.

Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.

The world forgets easily, too easily, what it does not like to remember.

Out of forty-eight boys twenty had never seen the Brooklyn Bridge that was scarcely five minutes' walk away, three only had been in Central Park, fifteen had known the joy of a ride in a horse-car. The street, with its ash-barrels and its dirt, the river that runs foul with mud, are their domain.

How shall the love of God be understood by those who have been nurtured in sight only of the greed of man?

Did not the manager of the Fresh Air Fund write to the pastor of an Italian Church only last year{9} that "no one asked for Italian children," and hence he could not send any to the country?

The slum is as old as civilization.