"Middleman" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reading-rooms, for whose benefit the older translations are still being reproduced. But the flattering tale of Hope again proved to be a snare and a delusion; I had once more dispensed with the services of Mr. Middleman, the publisher, and he naturally refused to aid and abet the dangerous innovation. The hint went abroad that the book belonged to the category which has borrowed a name from the ingenious Mr. Bowdler, and vainly half a century of reviewers spoke bravely in its praise. The public ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... The Middleman, the blessed agent, to them, of all good, tells them of the bright free land, where a golden harvest of profit is waiting them, if they will only realise their "all" and hand it over to him. With a shout of joy, in grateful paeans they ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, June 6, 1891 • Various
... only thing that ever prejudices me against a book is the lack of literary style; but I can quite understand how any ordinary critic would be strongly prejudiced against a work that was accompanied by a premature and unnecessary panegyric from the publisher. A publisher is simply a useful middleman. It is not for him to anticipate ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... shawls that are sold in London and Paris for hundreds of pounds and rugs that bring hundreds of dollars, but it costs them little to live; their wants are few, they have never known any better circumstances and are perfectly contented. The middleman, who is usually a Persian Jew, makes the ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... tobacco of the State. The Italian tobacco is generally bad, and formerly one had to smoke it or go without; but now the best of imported cigars may be found in all the large cities, cheaper in some respects than those in America, and not a whit inferior, since there is no middleman's profit, buying, as one does, direct from the State. The hotels, however, sell the same brands at an outrageous advance; the proprietor must have his commission, the concierge, the head-waiter, the waiters, the porters, and the chef, for this slight favor to the guest. Commission! It means something ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... crystal, imitate flowers, work woolen things, break in horses, dress harness, carve in copper, paint carriages, blow glass, corrode the diamond, polish metals, turn marble into leaves, labor on pebbles, deck out thought, tinge, bleach, or blacken everything—well, this middleman has come to that world of sweat and good-will, of study and patience, with promises of lavish wages, either in the name of the town's caprices or with the voice of the monster dubbed speculation. Thus, these quadrumanes set themselves to watch, work, and suffer, to fast, ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... details of the contract between the censor and the publicanus with regard to the collection of the dues. The conditions of the tenure of the Roman public land in Africa are known to us from the Lex Agraria of 111 B.C. (Bruns, Fontes, i. 3. 11, vv. 85 foll.). Here the publicanus is the middleman between the state and the possessor, and purchases from the censor the right of collecting dues. The law places no restriction on bargaining between the censor and the publicanus, but enacts that no possessor or pastor shall ever be required by the publicanus to ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... in America, where about all the great men we have had were bred in cabins, an' everything worth a fish-hook came out o' poverty! You have it in your power to hasten the end o' this wickedness,' I said. 'For one thing, you can make the middleman let go of our throats in this community. Near here are hundreds of acres o' land goin' to waste. Buy it an' make it produce—wool, meat, flax, grains, an' vegetables. Start a market an' a small factory here, an' satisfy yourself ...
— Keeping up with Lizzie • Irving Bacheller
... shop of modern times where goods are repaired or manufactured. They represent customs which now are irregular, but which formerly were permanent methods. It was a simple system, requiring no capital, no undertaker or manager, no middleman. Gradually these customs were replaced by many varied methods, such as the establishment of the laborer in his individual shop, who at first only made the raw material, which people brought him, into the finished product; later he was required ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... Dubois and managed, from roof to kitchen-midden, by Ching Po. French Eva dwelt alone in a thatched cottage built upon poles, and sold eggs and chickens and fish. The poultry she raised herself; for the fish, she was a middleman between fishermen and householders. As she owned a gramophone and one silk dress, it was clear that her business prospered. Even Ching Po bought eggs of her, though there was a nameless, uninterpreted hostility ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... essential Christian convictions in terms that are intelligible and persuasive to persons who have felt the force of the various intellectual movements of recent years. They do not pretend to make any contribution to scholarship; they aim at the less difficult, but perhaps scarcely less necessary middleman's task of bringing the results of the study of scholars to men and women who (to borrow a phrase of Augustine's) "believe in thinking" and wish to ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... you ass, about camping out. I am talking now about farm life. Farmers eliminate the middleman pretty effectually, and that in itself is going a long way toward complete happiness. Take the making of soap, that I told you about; there you have it, cheap and good. When you've made it, you know ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... India, the cinnamon purchased there chiefly came from Ceylon, and the spices from the Malay Peninsula and the Spice Islands. He therefore took steps to open up a direct trade in cinnamon with Ceylon, and made his famous expedition to Malacca. By such measures he hoped to avoid having to pay the middleman's profits for ...
— Rulers of India: Albuquerque • Henry Morse Stephens
... cattle, and even the fatting of cattle soon had to yield to the lowered prices occasioned by the importation of beef from western grazing lands. The making of butter and cheese, with the increased cost of labor on the farms, was abandoned, that the milk might be sold in bulk to the city middleman. The time had not come, however, in which farmers or their laborers imported condensed milk, or used none. Quaker Hill farmers lived too generously and substantially for that; but they ceased, during the Civil War, when milk was bought "at the platform" ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... you please his lust, for wealth and power who makes it possible for poor men to live in any great number. If he happens also to be a Captain of Industry, which usually he is not, it is merely one middleman cut out. His essential function is that of the money-grabber. It is by his exercise of that function ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... these guns were procured shows the marvelous nature of the organization and its resources. Finding that the cost of the guns was greatly increased by the profits of the manufacturer and the middleman, and that it was, in fact, very doubtful whether the government would permit them to purchase them in any large quantities, they resolved to make them for themselves. In the depths of abandoned coal mines, in the wildest and most ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... pioneers were hard-headed citizens. Many of the shopkeepers and merchants, after a short experience of the mines, hurried back to make the inevitable fortune that must come to the middleman in these extraordinary times. Within the first eight weeks of the gold excitement two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in gold dust reached San Francisco, and within: the following eight weeks six hundred thousand dollars more came in. All of this was ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... true. But in the book-trade—that profit-devourer unknown to Mrs. Eddy's book—a three-dollar book that is made for thirty-five or forty cents in large editions is put at three dollars because the publisher has to pay author, middleman, and advertising, and if the price were much below three the profit accruing would not pay him fairly for his time and labor. At the same time, if he could get ten dollars for the book he would take it, and his morals would not ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... can meet their demands more easily and are attracted to it, whereas a small lot of howsoever good a product must seek a buyer. Freight rates are reduced, damage in transit is reduced, and better transportation is secured in carload and trainload than in small shipments. The middleman's charges are less if he is assured a considerable volume of business. Thus specialization makes possible a more effective system of marketing than ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... management, until it was explained that she was anxious to undertake the poultry as a hobby. One of the carter boys was detailed to collect the eggs, as some of the hen-houses were in out-of-the-way corners of the yards and difficult to approach. My wife thought the middleman was appropriating most of the profit; she was determined to get as directly to the consumer as possible and, among others, she arranged with the head of a large school for a weekly supply of dairy and poultry produce. All went well for a time until one day the boy, anxious to produce as many ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... popular cry against the wicked middleman who stands between producer and consumer, and takes the bulk of the profit. There is much want of thought shown in this railing against the iniquities of the middleman. It is true that a large portion of the price paid by the poor goes to the ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... of consumers for the products of organized labor (and this unquestionably is in large measure the case) any increase in wages that can be secured through organization by a portion of the workers must, in part, be subtracted from the "real" incomes of the unorganized workers. The employer is middleman, not to a great degree the ultimate consumer of labor.[9] Some part, it is true, of the higher wage might be taken from profits or from wealth-incomes, but this would still leave ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... middleman," demands a contemporary. It might prove a simpler affair, after all, than the present system ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 20, 1917 • Various |
