Famous Quotes | A gentleman of Typee can bring...

A gentleman of Typee can bring up a numerous family of children and give them all a highly respectable cannibal education, with infinitely less toil and anxiety than he expends in the simple process of striking a light; whilst a poor European artisan, who through the instrumentality of a lucifer performs the same operation in one second, is put to his wits’ end to provide for his starving offspring that food which the children of a Polynesian father, without troubling their parent, pluck from the branches of every tree around them. - Herman Melville
Attribution: Herman Melville (1819–1891), U.S. author. Typee (1846), ch. 14, The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 1, eds. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (1968).

Categories: Author, Poverty And The Poor, Primitive Life, Progress

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