Coal Mine Quotes & Sayings

After all, game shows are not like working in a coal mine. — Drew Carey

Kids don't have a little brother working in the coal mine, they don't have a little sister coughing her lungs out in the looms of the big mill towns of the Northeast. Why? Because we organized; we broke the back of the sweatshops in this country; we have child labor laws. Those were not benevolent gifts from enlightened management. They were fought for, they were bled for, they were died for by working people, by people like us. Kids ought to know that. That's why I sing these songs. That's why I tell these stories, dammit. No root, no fruit! — Utah Phillips

In the right situation, acting on television can be extraordinarily satisfying creatively. But that's incredibly rare. Otherwise, it can be like working in a really remunerative coal mine. That's the down side. — Bradley Whitford

I had suddenly become aware of my hands, which meant only one thing: It was time to say my farewells and make a graceful
or at least dignified
exit.
Dogger had once told me, 'Your hands know when it's time to go.'
And he had been right. The hands are the canaries in one's own personal coal mine: They need to be watched carefully and obeyed. A fidget demands attention, and a full-blown not-knowing-what-to-do-with-them means 'Vamoose! — Alan Bradley

Writing is hard ... Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig. — Cheryl Strayed

Here in Indiana and in many states throughout the union, we rely on coal to power our homes and provide good-paying middle class jobs - like the one my family relied on when I was a kid. The coal mine helped put food on our table and helped me pursue an education and realize the American Dream. — Larry Bucshon

I do a job and am lucky enough to do a job that I love, but it is a hard one. I'm not saying it is as hard as working in a coal mine, but it is still difficult in a different way. Sometimes you have to go through very strong emotional journeys and then come back to yourself. And that can be difficult to control. — Javier Bardem

There were eruptions against the convict labor system in the South, in which prisoners were leased in slave labor to corporations, used thus to depress the general level of wages and also to break strikes. In the year 1891, miners of the Tennessee Coal Mine Company were asked to sign an "iron-clad contract": pledging no strikes, agreeing to get paid in scrip, and giving up the right to check the weight of the coal they mined (they were paid by the weight). They refused to sign and were evicted from their houses. Convicts were brought in to replace them. — Howard Zinn

You know, when something like, even like a coal mine disaster, or something like this, you think that well everybody's going to make a run to be able to get out, but it happened to fast that they were just all dead. — Richard Grimes

Would you rather see a super soldier battling Nazis or something more serious? Or lesbians down a coal mine? Generally, the films are engaging in the same way as the comics are. It's no coincidence that the biggest movies are genre-related, whether it's Lord of the Rings or comic books. — Mark Millar

In Marin County, north of San Francisco, the search for a safe haven resulted in a new apartment complex - the first, and only, such government-sponsored project aimed at MCS. — Peter Radetsky

At times you feel like you're the only voice speaking out to improve the working conditions of people, whether it's to be able to collectively bargain, to get adequate pay, to know that you can come home safe out of a coal mine. — Hilda Solis

Don't save the canary. Fix the coal mine. — Seth Godin

Nightlife is not for sissies, except of course for career sissies; an evening out requires at least a full day of minute preparation ... People move to New York to invent themselves, and nightclubs provide a runway for the results. It's easy to spend twenty hours per day slaving in a Pennsylvania coal mine or threshing some Nebraska oat crop; going out in New York is work. — Paul Rudnick

Remember, baby, don't never let a man mine you for your riches. Don't let him take a pickax to that treasure in your soul. Remember, they can't get it until you give it to them. They might lie and try to trick you out of it, baby, and they'll try. They might lay a hand on you, or worse, they might break your spirit, but the only way they can get it is to convince you it's not yours to start with. To convince you there's nothing there but a lump of coal. — Cynthia Bond

You can't mine coal without machine guns. — Richard B. Mellon

Like the canary in the coal mine, the climate changes already evident in the Arctic are a call to action. — Susan Collins

They are closing the mine in two weeks, they say. Six days a week bumping down in the gondola, pecking out the rocks and hauling them back up, doing it again the next day for twenty-seven years, one cave-in, three thin raises, and a failed strike. Where am I going to go every day, what am I going to do with all that sunshine? — Lou Beach

A life without once reading Hamlet is like a life spent in a coal mine. — Hector Berlioz

The average life expectancy of a celebrity is 20 years less than someone working in a coal mine. — Moby

The print was an old one made from a negative taken in the 1960's of her parents in Sydney Mines, dancing with thrilled, excited expressions on their faces, in front of a classic car that had been a wedding gift at the time. Her mother's hair, red back then, was held back by a blue handkerchief, and she was dressed in a billowing skirt and white blouse. Her father's denim jeans and faded t-shirt were streaked with coal dust as he held her hands and spun her around in the front yard of their old clapboard house, yellow grass under their feet and a cobalt-blue sky with white clouds drifting above. Mandy could almost feel the late summer breeze as she gazed deeply into the print, watching the flamboyant colors come to life. She hung it up to dry on two wooden clothespins hanging from a string above her. — Rebecca McNutt

I have visited sweatshops, factories, and crowded slums. If I could not see it, I could smell it. The foundation of society is laid upon a basis of ... individualism, conquest and exploitation ... A social order such as this, built upon such wrong and basic principles, is bound to retard the development of all. The output of a cotton mill or a coal mine is considered of greater importance than the production of healthy, happy-hearted and free human beings. We, the people, are not free. Our democracy is but a name. — Helen Keller

You keep doin' what you doin' and the white man don't got to do it no more. He ain't got to sell you or put you in a coal mine to own you. He'll own you just as is, and he'll say you the one who did it. He'll say it's your fault. — Yaa Gyasi

The men who mine coal and fire furnaces and balance ledgers and turn lathes and pick cotton and heal the sick and plant corn - all serve as proudly, and as profitably, for America as the statesmen who draft treaties and the legislators who enact laws. — George Washington

The way we view fiction is a reflection of how we define ourselves as a nation. Works of the imagination are canaries in the coal mine, the measure by which we can evaluate the health of the rest of society. — Azar Nafisi

I watch his hands, his beautiful, capable fingers. Scarred, as mine were before the Capitol erased all marks from my skin, but strong and deft. Hands that have the power to mine coal but the precision to set a delicate snare. Hands I trust. — Suzanne Collins

There is, as every schoolboy knows in this scientific age, a very close chemical relation between coal and diamonds. It is the reason, I believe, why some people allude to coal as "black diamonds." Both these commodities represent wealth; but coal is a much less portable form of property. There is, from that point of view, a deplorable lack of concentration in coal. Now, if a coal-mine could be put into one's waistcoat pocket - but it can't! At the same time, there is a fascination in coal, the supreme commodity of the age in which we are camped like bewildered travellers in a garish, unrestful hotel. — Joseph Conrad

At least three times a week, I am overwhelmed with a wave of gratitude to New York City for providing me with a life. Not that my life is so great, although I think it's pretty nifty: I don't mine coal; I get paid to write. — David Rakoff

Is a park any better than a coal mine? What's a mountain got that a slag pile hasn't? What would you rather have in your garden
an almond tree or an oil well? — Jean Giraudoux

If all currencies are moving up or down together, the question is: relative to what? Gold is the canary in the coal mine. It signals problems with respect to currency markets. Central banks should pay attention to it. — Alan Greenspan

Measles is probably the best argument for why there needs to be global health, and why we have to think about it as a global public good. Because in a sense, measles is the canary in the coal mine for immunization. It is, you know, highly transmissible. The vaccine costs 15 cents, so it's not - you know, shouldn't be an issue in terms of cost. — Seth Berkley

Imagine anybody having lived forty-five or fifty years without knowing Hamlet! One might as well spend one's life in a coal mine. — Hector Berlioz

fresh air down inta the mine. When the doors throughout the mine are shut, the air be trapped an' forced inta the side chutes an' minin' chambers. That's why ya be called trappers. Yur job is ta open the doors when a coal car approaches, then shut 'em agin." "Oh." David knew — Gerald N. Lund

I don't have any great first job tales: I've never worked on a tramp steamer or in a coal mine or anything like that. I think the inspiration for my writing came largely from my father and the joy that life in books represented to me. — Mary Gordon

American Casualties on the USS Maine

Two hundred & Sixty Six American sailors were killed when the American battleship, USS Maine, exploded and sank in Havana harbor after a massive explosion of undetermined origin. The first Board of Inquiry regarding the incident stated that a mine placed on or near the hull had sunk the ship. Later studies determined that it was more likely heat from smoldering coal in the ship's bunker that set off the explosion in an adjoining ammunition locker.

In February 1898, the recovered bodies of the American sailors who died on the battleship were interred in the Colon Cemetery, in Havana. Nearly two years later they were exhumed and now 163 of the crew that were killed in 1898 are buried at Arlington National Cemetery, near the USS Maine Memorial.

The beautiful monument shown is located in Central Park West in New York City. — Hank Bracker

...as nervous as a bird in a coal mine. — Jim Butcher

How humid the heart, its messy rooms! We eat spicy food, sweat like wood and smolder like the coal mine that caught fire decades ago, yet still smokes more than my great-uncle who will not quit- or go out- — Kevin Young

He was just thinking aloud, ruling out possibilities by releasing them into the air, like canaries in the coal mine of his mind. — John Connolly

In Capricornia there is a particular regional particularity and that is the Adani mine. We know that Adani, the massive Indian coal company, wants to develop the Carmichael mine.And people in Rockhampton know that and they know that the Greens are doing everything they possibly can to prevent the development of the Adani mine. — George Brandis

When we first invested in Colombia, we were buying a lot of coal from Colombia. We were dealing with them daily. I knew their guys at the port, I knew their guys at the mine, I had a feel of the country. — Ivan Glasenberg

Some types of environmental restoration projects are well-known; restored wetlands, for instance, or coal mine reclamation projects. Recently though, larger dam removal projects have started, a number of them in Washington state. — Matt Gonzalez

That said, I'm embarrassed and furious that so many coal-state Democrats in the U.S. Senate are paralyzing international progress to protect the short term interests of a dying industry that ravages the environment from mine to slag heap. — Denis Hayes

Tie your heart at night to mine, love,
and both will defeat the darkness
like twin drums beating in the forest
against the heavy wall of wet leaves.
Night crossing: black coal of dream
that cuts the thread of earthly orbs
with the punctuality of a headlong train
that pulls cold stone and shadow endlessly.
Love, because of it, tie me to a purer movement,
to the grip on life that beats in your breast,
with the wings of a submerged swan,
So that our dream might reply
to the sky's questioning stars
with one key, one door closed to shadow. — Pablo Neruda

Working in a prison, is, to my mind, similar in ways to working in a coal mine. It's going to scare away a lot of people. — Jennifer Haigh

Social media is the ultimate canary in the coal mine — Jay Baer

Teenagers, especially girl ones, seem like the perfect canary-in-the-coal-mine characters to me. They capture American culture and its perversion, its hypocrisy - how absorbed we are with youth and beauty and sexualized imagery, for instance, while preaching abstinence and modesty. — Antonya Nelson

Geoff Muldaur was and is one of my musical heroes. When I listen to him sing and play, I can hear the coal mine, the cotton field, and last, but certainly foremost, the boy's boarding school. — Loudon Wainwright III

Try as you might, you'll never be able to please an environmentalist. You can stop using coal to heat your house, you can stop throwing out bottles and cans, you can have every factory in Canada shut down and you can buy only organic gluten-free non-GMO food, you can give up your favorite station wagon for a weird electric hybrid, you can stop developing film and buy a never-ending cycle of digital cameras, you can give up your job at a refinery or mill, and they'll still get after you for not enjoying yourself while doing so. — Rebecca McNutt

Today, the ideal male is the gay man and the ideal female is the worker female, the woman who can work in a coal mine just like all the other men. — Camille Paglia

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

We're not saying that you don't need coal, but when you do mine the coal there are responsibilities to it. It may cost a little more, but it is the right thing to do. — Kevin Richardson

The canary bird in the coal mine theory of the arts: artists should be treasured as alarm systems. — Kurt Vonnegut

If there were to be a Labor-Greens government, that would be the end of the Adani mine, that would be the end of coal mining in central Queensland, and that would be the end of their best shot at economic prosperity in the future. — George Brandis

Good thing we weren't here when this happened," Fred added. "We'd be pancakes - DEAD ones! — Jo Ann Yhard

Marriage is like working in a coal mine. You hack away in the dark, day after day, busting rock, and you think you're not getting anywhere, and then all of a sudden, this little sliver of sunlight appears and you say to yourself, oh, that's what I've been waiting for
just a little light, just a little bit of hope
a sign, maybe, that will get me through. And ... it does. — Adriana Trigiani

No company can be expected to build a nuclear reactor, an oil well, a coal mine, or anything else that's one hundred percent safe under all circumstances. The costs would be prohibitive. It's unreasonable to expect corporations to totally guard against small chances of every potential accident. — Robert Reich

Likewise, civilizations have throughout history marched blindly toward disaster, because humans are wired to believe that tomorrow will be much like today - it is unnatural for us to think that this way of life, this present moment, this order of things is not stable and permanent. Across the world today, our actions testify to our belief that we can go on like this forever, burning oil, poisoning the seas, killing off other species, pumping carbon into the air, ignoring the ominous silence of our coal mine canaries in favor of the unending robotic tweets of our new digital imaginarium. Yet the reality of global climate change is going to keep intruding on our fantasies of perpetual growth, permanent innovation and endless energy, just as the reality of mortality shocks our casual faith in permanence. — Roy Scranton

There are times when the heart, like the canary in the coal mine, breathes in the world's toxicity and begins to die. — Parker J. Palmer

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes. — Blaise Cendrars

All things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature. Therefore is nature glorious with form, color, and motion, that every globe in the remotest heaven; every chemical change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of life; every change of vegetation from the first principle of growth in the eye of a leaf, to the tropical forest and antediluvian coal-mine; every animal function from the sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the Ten Commandments. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Well, I'll tell you, one of things I'm proud of is for someone from Southern California, who didn't grow up around coal mines, I learned a lot that tragic day we lost twenty-nine miners at Upper Big Branch coal mine. — Hilda Solis

When the President is making it harder to mine coal, to use coal, to take advantage of our gas resources, to make it harder to get our oil resources - all those things combine to make our cost of energy higher than it needs to be, and it drives away enterprises from this country. It sends it to places that have lower-cost energy. — Mitt Romney

The end of coal in Appalachia doesn't mean that America is running out of coal (there's plenty left in Wyoming). But it should end the fantasy that coal can be an engine of job creation - the big open pit mines in Wyoming employ a tiny fraction of the number of people in an underground mine in Appalachia. — Jeff Goodell