Henry Mayhew

“Facts, according to my ideas, are merely the elements of truths, and not the truths themselves; of all matters there are none so utterly useless by themselves as your mere matters of fact.”

“The costermongers' boys will, I am informed, cheat their employers, but they do not steal from them.”

“But the branches of industry are so multifarious, the divisions of labour so minutes and manifold, that it seems at first almost impossible to reduce them to any system.”

“It is easy enough to be moral after a good dinner beside a snug coal fire, and with our hearts well warmed with fine old port.”

“The essential quality of an animal is that it seeks its own living, whereas a vegetable has its living brought to it.”

“Ballet-girls have a bad reputation, which is in most cases well deserved.”

“In No. 1 of this street the cholera first appeared seventeen years ago, and spread up it with fearful virulence; but this year it appeared at the opposite end, and ran down it with like severity.”

“I was conducted in the evening to a tavern where several of the weavers who advocate the principles of the People's Charter were in the habit of assembling.”

“We then journeyed on to London Street, down which the tidal ditch continues its course.”

“The deductive method is the mode of using knowledge, and the inductive method the mode of acquiring it.”

“There is a tone of morality throughout the rural districts of England, which is unhappily wanting in the large towns and the centres of particular manufactures.”

“A fact must be assimilated with, or discriminated fromm, some other fact or facts, in order to be raised to the dignity of a truth, and made to convey the least knowledge to the mind.”

“Advice to persons about to marry - don't.”

“We may either proceed from principles to facts, or recede from facts to principles.”

“The city of London, within the walls, occupies a space of only 370 acres, and is but the hundred and fortieth part of the extent covered by the whole metropolis.”

“Park women, properly so called, are those degraded creatures, utterly lost to all sense of shame, who wander about the paths most frequented after nightfall in the Parks, and consent to any species of humiliation for the sake of acquiring a few shillings.”