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Unearned   Listen
adjective
Unearned  adj.  Not earned; not gained by labor or service.
Unearned increment (Polit. Econ.), a increase in the value of land due to no labor or expenditure on the part of the owner, but to natural causes, such as the increase of population, the growth of a town in the vicinity, or the like. Some hold that this should belong to the nation.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Unearned" Quotes from Famous Books



... coming in to wish me good-bye, "Why, surely, Isabel, you're not going to receive that gentleman looking such a fright as this?" As if a Socialist could care for dress! How I felt he would despise me for all the outward signs which proved that I was living on the results of "unearned increment" (vide Karl Marx) and that I was a mere ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith

... ludicrously perfunctory, and his listlessness when in the office was apparent to everybody. At the bottom of her heart, Sarah Maitland must have known that it was all a farce. Blair was worth nothing to the business; his only relation to it was the weekly drawing of an unearned "salary." Perhaps if Mrs. Richie had been in Mercer, to make again and again the appeal of confident expectation, that little feeble sense of duty which had started him upon his "career," might have struck a root down through feeling, into the rock-bed of character. But as it was, not even the girls' ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland

... dawn of this spiritual Commune. When the first full notes of the soul's "Marseillaise" burst upon his irritable eardrums, I can hear above them his savage snarl. I can see his malignant expression as he is forced to divide his unearned increment of fame with some of those Mitmenschen whom he, like a bad Samaritan, loved to lash with his tongue before pouring in oil of vitriol and the sour wine of sadness. And how like red-ragged turkey-cocks Lord Byron and Nietzsche and Napoleon will puff out when required ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler

... up his account with this notable fact among the premises of his inquiry, that they have had a shorter course to cover and have therefore, in the sporting phrase, had the inside track. They measure from a higher datum line. Among the advantages which so have come, in a sense unearned, to the French people, is their uninterrupted retention, out of Roman—and perhaps pre-Roman—times, of the conception of a commonwealth, a community of men with joint and mutual interests apart from any superimposed dependence on a joint feudal superior. The French people ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen

... this general recreancy and treason to the principles that our fathers established by the sword—having in constant observation this almost universal hospitality to the solemn nonsense of hereditary rank and unearned distinction, my faith in practical realization of republican ideals is small, and I falter in the work of their maintenance in the interest of a people for whom they are too good. Seeing that we are ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce

... depriving him of the opportunity of earning both appetite and good digestion by honest toil. So he resorts to condiments and ragouts, palate-tickling and tongue-tickling sauces and nerve-rousing stimulants, as a means of securing the unearned ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 13th Annual Meeting - Rochester, N.Y. September, 7, 8 and 9, 1922 • Various

... specimen, representing, I'm afraid, nothing but the end of the century, unearned income, amateurism, and individual liberty—a different thing from individualism, Jolly. You are the fifth Jolyon Forsyte, old man, and you open the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... was all upon the surface. Beneath there was fear and respect—the fear and respect which those demoralized by unearned luxury and by the purposeless life always feel when faced by strength and self-reliance in the crises where externals avail no more than its paint and its bunting a warship in battle. She knew she had been treating him as no self-respecting man who knew the world would ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips

... beneficially employed. The great abbeys vied with each other in architectural magnificence, in this more especially, but likewise in every branch of liberal expenditure, giving employment to great numbers, which was better than giving unearned food. They provided, as it became them, for the old and helpless also. That they prevented the necessity of raising rates for the poor by the copious alms which they distributed, and by indiscriminately feeding the indigent, has been inferred, because those rates became necessary immediately ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey

... direction of concentration of wealth: (1) The unearned increment of land, especially in cities, is no doubt a real force. (2) The trust movement is operating in its earlier phases, at least, in the direction of concentration. (3) In the third place, war, whenever it comes, carries with it forces which bring wealth to the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... beckoned to his friends, who speedily overtook him. When the party turned the corner of Front Street and were safely out of sight of Judge Straight's office, the capitalist entered the grocery store and invested his unearned increment in gingerbread. When the ensuing saturnalia was over, Billy finished the game of marbles which the judge had interrupted, and then set out to execute his commission. He had nearly reached his objective point when he met upon the street a young white lady, ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt

... be avoided. Now no one speculates in his own legitimate business, for there he is acquainted with the hazards which, he has learned, require the best of knowledge and the greatest of prudence. It is the allurement of the unknown that tempts him to seek unearned profits through speculation in outside regions where, in the nature of the case, the chances must be against him. Now speculation has its proper place in business: there are certain inherent hazards that must be undertaken, mainly ...
— Creating Capital - Money-making as an aim in business • Frederick L. Lipman

... But there have come to me one or two times, dear, when I dared a little of the labor of things, and drank a drop or two of the wine of the spirit; and those times have lived to haunt me and make me at least not a happy man in my unearned ease. There come to me still just once in a while hours when I get sight of the gleam, hours that make me loathe all that in my hours of comfort I loved; and there comes over me then a kind of Titanic rage, that I should ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair

... appealing to you. It could not be otherwise. Now, with this aggregate, you, and I, and everyone can own vast estates, buy forty-year debentures, lend money on approved security, buy real estate, the unearned increment of which will net in some cases two or three hundred per cent. interest, besides an increased valuation ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)

... supplying raw materials for the new factory processes, that prices fell, even when stated in terms of gold. In a period of falling prices and appreciating currency, the gap between the poor and the rich was widened. The debtor carried a growing burden while the creditor harvested an unearned increase. Persons who lived on fixed salary or income profited by the fluctuations, but commercial transactions were made more difficult for ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson

... capital are consistent with social fairness; but if it is shown that interest is simply the "natural price" of capital representing the actual "productive power" of the capital, there is nothing further to say. You may have similar qualms over rent and the rightness and wrongness of it. The enormous "unearned increment" that accrues for the fortunate owner of land who toils not neither spins to obtain it, may seem difficult of justification. But after all, land is only one particular case of ownership under the one and the same system. The rent for ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock

... thousand students. Many of them come from the country and from factory towns. A large number come from the farms of the West. Many of these students are paying for their education by money earned by their own hands. It is said that unearned money does not enrich. The money that a student earns for his own education does enrich his life. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh that he has wickedly seized; when it is the head I have pillowed on my breast for four years—the child that has known no father, his mother's only companion in her unearned shame, the shame of an outcast—then is it so that your law of Haro may not apply? Messieurs, it is the justice of Haro that I ask, not your lax usage of it. From this Prince Philip I appeal to the spirit of Prince Rollo who made this law. I appeal to the law of Jersey which ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... fastened to the back of the cart, so that it fell to the ground. "That will feed our horses for a week," he said with a chuckle, in which the other man joined. It was pleasant to become so easily possessed of an unearned increment in the shape ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard

... to expose it. Had the man acknowledged his fault and been submissive, there would have been an end of the matter. Heathcote would have said no word about it to any one, and would not have stopped a farthing from the week's unearned wages. That he had to encounter a certain amount of ill usage from the rough men about him, and to forgive it, he could understand; but it could not be his duty, either as a man or a master, to pass over dishonesty ...
— Harry Heathcote of Gangoil • Anthony Trollope

... of the obligations under which your extreme efficiency and your thoughtfulness in many matters have placed me. It is to you I owe my unearned profits from the transaction in oil, and it is to you I owe the 'Herald's' extraordinary present circulation, growth of power and influence. That power is still under my direction, and is an added responsibility ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington

... "pom-pom-peel-away" and similar games. Football, however, would take us to a vacant corner lot, some two streets away. Some absentee owner in the East was doubtless paying taxes on it with hopes of finally recouping himself through the unearned increment. Meanwhile it ran somewhat to rubbish and tin cans, to bare spots from which adjoining homemakers had removed irregular squares of turf, and to holes in the dry, brown earth where potatoes had been baked with a minimum of success and a maximum ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller

... are expected to join on church parade—it appears an impious folly to appraise war as a necessity for human happiness. Or if indeed it be a blessing, however much in disguise, why not boldly pray to have the full benefit of it in our time, instead of passing it on, like unearned increment, for the advantage of posterity? Such a thing is unimaginable. A prayer for war would make people jump; it would empty a church quicker than the collection. Nevertheless, it is probable that the great majority of every congregation does in its heart ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson

... Daddy? Uncle, he had intended they should call him; but that is, for beginning speech, a hard saying, embracing both a palatal and a liquid. Whereas Da-da—the syllables come almost unconsciously to the infant mouth. So he had encouraged it, and even felt an irrational pride in the honourable but unearned title. ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley

... the heroine's) and is imprisoned there by the sticking of a shutter. An awkward incident, of course, especially as it occurred in the dead of night, but scarcely enough to make half a novel out of. Naturally, in the end Leslie owns up about the heroism, and goes away to justify his unearned credit upon the stricken field; but I am afraid I must confess that the prospect of his return left me indifferent. I understand that The Reconnaissance originally appeared in The Daily Telegraph; this being so, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various

... just living! While they think of themselves cannily as "practical" men, I think them the most impractical men I know, for in a world full of boundless riches they remain obstinately poor. They are unwilling to invest even a few of their dollars unearned in the real wealth of the earth. For it is only the sense of the spirit of life, whether in nature or in other human beings, that lifts men above the beasts and curiously leads them to God, who is the spirit both of beauty and of friendliness. I say truly, having now reached the point in my life ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson

... years the American people have been living on the unearned increment of the unoccupied land. But now that all our land has been staked out in homesteads and we cannot turn to new soil when we have used up the old, we must learn, as the older races have learned, ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson

... and the gift of fit and beautiful expression in verse-form—if these may be taken as the equipment of a poet, nearly all of this volume is poetry. And if to the sum of these be added the indescribable increment of charm which comes occasionally to the work of some poet, quite unearned by any of these catalogued qualities of his, you have a fair measure of Mr. Noyes at his best.... Two considerations render Mr. Noyes interesting above most poets: the wonderful degree in which ...
— The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays • William B. Yeats

... languages he could speak more purely than his native Russian. Our good-natured, corpulent host had emigrated, in the pioneer days, from the steppes of southern Russia, and had grown wealthy through the "unearned increment." ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben

... thousand pounds without, in some shape or form, giving a quid pro quo. Now Philip's quid was to rid his house and the neighbourhood of Arthur Heigham, his guest and his daughter's lover. It was not a task he liked, but the unearned cheque in his breeches- pocket continually reminded him of the ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard

... ruffian had shadowed them until they had met a four-wheeler, had held the lady's dress from the wheel and overheard the address given to the driver for which he had received tuppence, and had disappeared into a doorway where he had spat on his unearned increment and ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest

... looked forward to for many years was to have means enough to permit me to travel over the world; and at the same time to have my small capital invested in such a way as would secure not only as big a per cent. interest as possible, with due security, but also a large probability of unearned increment, so to speak; and above all to require little personal attention. Dozens of schemes presented themselves, many with most rosy outlooks. I was several times on the very verge of decision, and how easily and differently one's ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson

... amusement in playthings; and on the other side" (he stammered) "it's a means for the coterie of the district to make money. Formerly they had wardships, courts of justice, now they have the district council—not in the form of bribes, but in the form of unearned salary," he said, as hotly as though someone of those present had opposed ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy

... have become their rule in life; from which, despite responsibility, they are unable to break loose, and according to which, therefore, they act. Then, when they are found to be good for nothing, they are either retired, and eat the unearned bread of pensioners (unearned, of course, only in such cases as theirs), or, if they have a cousin or great-uncle anywhere, who can put in a good word for them, or if they belong to the best families, or if they are very religious—why, then God Almighty intervenes, and the ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein

... to fall under the influence of such a man cannot be told. Supplementing the blessing was the association with a number of the best of men among the church adherents. Hardly second to the great and unearned friendship of Dr. Stebbins was that of Horace Davis, ten years my senior, and very close to Dr. Stebbins in every way. He had been connected with the church almost from the first and was a firm friend of Starr King. Like Dr. ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock

... cuckoo in many directions,' said the Nilghai, still chuckling over the thought of the dinner. 'Never mind. We had both been working very hard, and it was your unearned increment we spent, and as you're only a loafer it ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling

... this evening she that was the life of my life passed to the relief and the peace of death, after twenty-two months of unjust and unearned suffering. I first saw her thirty-seven years ago, and now I have looked upon her face for the last time.... I was full of remorse for things done and said in these thirty- four years of married life ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine

... of Troy follow us. You too may now unforbidden spare the nation of Pergama, gods and goddesses to whomsoever Ilium and the great glory of Dardania did wrong. And thou, O prophetess most holy, foreknower of the future, grant (for no unearned realm does my destiny claim) a resting-place in Latium to the Teucrians, to their wandering gods and the storm-tossed deities of Troy. Then will I ordain to Phoebus and Trivia a temple of solid marble, and festal days in Phoebus' ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil

... finally prevails on them to let him go. It is what he amounts to after he gets away that makes him either a prodigal or a thoroughbred. If a boy goes into bad company, and thinks the world is made to spend unearned money in, instead of to earn money in and save it, it is only a matter of time when he comes back home a prodigal son, either alive and needing a doctor and a mother's care, or he comes in a box to be buried, his father ...
— Peck's Uncle Ike and The Red Headed Boy - 1899 • George W. Peck

... you friend, I wish you this— No gentle destiny throughout the years; No soft content, or ease, or unearned bliss Bereft of heart-ache where no sorrow nears, But rather rugged trouble for a mate To mold your soul against the coming blight, To train you for the ruthless whip of fate And build your heart ...
— Bobby of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace

... to the income of the taxpayer but according to the alleged value of his property. It is thus, again, a variation of the system long adopted in this country of a special rate of income tax on what is called "unearned" income, i.e. income from invested property. But it is only when one begins to adopt the broadminded views lately fashionable of the possibilities of a levy on capital and to talk of taking, say, 20 per cent. of the value ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers

... servant, Justine Megot, the chlorotic daughter of drunken parents; married in 1863 to Louise de Mareuil, who dies childless the same year; succumbs to ataxia in 1873. A dissemination of characteristics. Moral prepotency of his father, physical likeness to his mother. Idle, inclined to spending unearned money. ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson

... the land began to take on what the economists call "unearned increment," or community value, and the Gowdy lands began the work which finally made him a millionaire; but it was not his work. It was mine, and Magnus Thorkelson's, and the work of the neighbors generally, on the farms and in the ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick

... allowance under a different name," sneered old Peter. "Now you're turning socialist—oh, you don't suppose I'm blind when I come to your name and your quixotic schemes in the newspapers! You don't like the red-hot chaps raving about 'unearned increment,' or whatever they ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson

... to this 'inheritance of mankind,' which by our institutions a minority is at present enabled to monopolize, and which it does monopolize and use in order to extort thereby an unearned increment; and this inheritance is true capital. We mean thereby the principle, potentiality, embodied in the axe, the spade, the plough, the steam-engine, tools of all kinds, books or pictures, bequeathed by thinkers, writers, inventors, discoverers, and other labourers ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson

... twenty-five out of the thirty-eight millions to be spent by his Department this year. But let no one mistake him for a mere HORNE of Plenty, pouring out benefits indiscriminately upon the genuine unemployed and the work-shy. He has already deprived some seventeen thousand potential domestics of their unearned increment, and he promises ruthless prosecution of all who try to cheat the State ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various

... effect, for it comes to a great extent from the individual and not from business. The present method of income tax, however, has some weaknesses. The same levy is made upon earned incomes as upon those that are unearned. The tax on earned incomes tends in certain cases to be passed on to the consumer or deducted from the farmer, and, besides, it is not just that a family living by giving productive service to the community should pay the same as ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg

... "Thou shalt not steal." It is said to us, "Ye shall take no unearned gain from your fellows, but pay to society in productive labor what ye take ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch

... legislature is entitled to interpose for the reclamation of rights unjustly usurped from the community; while, as economical science shows that the value of land rises from natural causes, the conclusion is that the State may confiscate the unearned increment. But it was not so easy to convince the hungry mechanic, by rather fine-drawn distinctions, that the capitalist had a better right to monopolise profits than the landlord; for the rise of value in manufactured ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... that should have been devoted to furnishing the needed equipment, and which the corporations contracted to provide when they accepted their charters, have been divided as construction profits, or, as in the case of the Santa Fe, Union Pacific, and many others, diverted to the payment of unearned dividends, while the public suffers from this failure to ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee

... name Is Gervase Deane. Your servant, if you please." "Oh, Sir, indeed I know you, for your fame For exploits in the field has reached my ears. I did not know you wounded and returned." "But just come back, Madam. A silly prick To gain me such unearned Holiday making. And you, it appears, Must be Sir Everard's lady. And my fears At ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell

... rich by defrauding the worker of his wages. The worker must starve so that a few rich people may live in luxury, and things will become better for the worker only when there are no more rich men. "The gains of the capitalist are simply the losses of labour! The partly or wholly unearned incomes of the rich consist of the unpaid, withheld wages of the industrious poor."[117] "Only by living off another man's labour and denying another man the fruits of his toil can riches be acquired. Riches are directly responsible for poverty, and the art of being rich is the art of keeping ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker

... dimly made you out as getting while I flattened my nose against the shop window and you were there within, eating the tarts, shall I say, or handing them over the counter? It's to-day as if you had taken all the trouble for me and left me at last all the unearned increment or fine psychological gain! I have hovered about two or three of your distinguished persons a bit longingly (in the past); but you open up the abysses, or such like, that I really missed, and the torch you play over them is often luridly illuminating. I find my experience, ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith

... of truth in the old saying—that it takes three generations to make a gentleman and there is no doubt but that the second is infinitely the worst of the three. Shortly the country will pass through a period when an unearned increment will fall into the hands of a half-educated class, whose life has nurtured in them strong animal passions; but I see no reason why we should not pass through the social as we are passing through the political crisis, and obtain a modified aristocracy in the third generation, ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny

... democratic ownership of industry, beginning with the simplest type of public utilities and monopolies, and extending gradually as we learn the way; the use of taxation to limit inheritance and to take the unearned increment for public use beginning (but not ending) with a "single tax" on monopolized land values; the training of the public in business technique by co-operation in buying and selling, and in industrial technique by the ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois

... private use of this unearned distinction; there is nothing in me of the charlatan that claimed mysterious power; but my subordinates, ever in growing numbers as my promotions followed, held me in greater respect, apparently, on that very ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood

... resolution which under less favorable circumstances were shown by the women of the Revolution and of the Civil War, then our nation has before it a career of greatness never hitherto equaled. This book is fundamentally an appeal, not that woman shall enjoy any privilege unearned, but that hers shall be the right to do more than she has ever yet done, and to do it on terms of self-respecting partnership with men. Equality of right does not mean identity of function; but it does necessarily imply identity of purpose ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch

... this paradox. The field has for many years lain idle in the midst of a growing town because of a flaw in the title, and when eventually the title is quieted and the land is sold it pours wealth upon heads not educated to use it with wisdom. Here is unearned increment made flesh and converted into drama: the field that might have been home and garden and playground becomes a machine, a monster, which gradually visits evil upon all concerned. Then Adelle and her proletarian cousin, aware that the field through the corruption of a well-meant ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren

... wrinkling his forehead in the perplexity of artistic temperament, batting a speculative eye at me meanwhile, but not in any spirit of resentment. In fact, he had nothing to resent. He had absorbed the unearned increment and I had my original capital, the bean poles, intact—and that's more than most of us realize on small investments, nowadays. So I dare say he thought I had nothing to feel grieved about. Later he would sally forth and carry out his artistic dreams ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard

... for July, he said that it was enough to ruin any boy in the world. Indeed, I myself was conscious of the fact that I had not done a stroke of work all that month for those sixty-five and a half dollars; and in order that my father might be convinced of my determination not to let such unearned wealth lead me into dissipation, I at once offered to lend him fifty dollars to pay a debt due to somebody on the Freeport Baptist meeting-house. ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield

... to the line of "low visibility," which means, "Keep your head down or you may get hit"; who allow others to do the fighting and bear all the criticism, and then are not even gracious enough to acknowledge the unearned benefits. The most popular man in every community is the one who has never taken a stand on any moral question; who has never loved anything well enough to fight for it; who is broad-minded and tolerant—because he does not care.... ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung

... unjustified; unentitled^, disentitled, unqualified, disqualified; unprivileged, unchartered. illegitimate, bastard, spurious, supposititious, false; usurped. tortious [Law]. undeserved, unmerited, unearned; unfulfilled. forfeited, disfranchised. improper; unmeet, unfit, unbefitting, unseemly; unbecoming, misbecoming^; seemless^; contra bonos mores [Lat.]; not the thing, out of the question, not to be thought of; preposterous, pretentious, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... gentleman—how much of his winnings had already leaked through his careless fingers it was impossible to surmise. Durkin even resented the thought of that extravagance—as though it were a personal and obvious injustice to himself. If it was all the fruit of blind chance, if it came thus unearned and accidental, why should he not have his share of it? Already Monte Carlo had taught him the mad necessity for money. But now, of all times, it was necessary for him. One-half, one-quarter, of the sum which this careless-eyed ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer

... myself, most unwillingly, a cause of annoyance to Victoria, and a pretext for her repression. Importance flowed in on me unasked, unearned. To speak in homely fashion, she was always "a bad second," and none save herself attributed to her the normal status of privileges of an elder sister. Her wrath was not visited on me, but on those who exalted me so unduly; even while she resented my position she was not, ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope

... the price is not here in question. We know who has said, 'I counsel thee to buy of Me gold tried in the fire.' We buy heavenly Wisdom when we surrender ourselves. The price is desire to possess, and willingness to accept as an undeserved, unearned gift. But that does not come into view in our lesson. Only this is strongly put in it—that this heavenly Wisdom outshines all jewels, outweighs all wealth, and is indeed the only true riches. 'Rubies' is probably rather to be taken as 'corals,' ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... led away. Fifty thousand pounds, properly invested, is only two thousand a year. When you have deducted the income-tax—and the tax on unearned income ...
— First Plays • A. A. Milne

... Answered, not rising: 'Yea, from lands of storm And seas cut through by fiery lava floods I come, a wanderer. Ye, meantime, in climes Balm-breathing, gorge the fat, and smell the sweet: Ye wed the maid whose sire ye never slew, And bask in unearned triumph. Feeble spirits! Endless ye deem the splendours of this hour, And call defeat opprobrious! Sirs, our life Is trial. Victory and Defeat are Gods That toss man's heart, their plaything, each to each: Great Mercia knows that truth—of all your realms Faithfullest to Odin far!' 'Nay, minstrel, ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere

... this amount as salary, a very handsome salary by the way, paid in advance, you taking the risks of my dying or becoming incapacitated before it is earned, I will say no more of the matter. If not I must refuse to accept what is an unearned gift." ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard

... as I found you had no title. I had just about that much income accumulated at my banker's while I've been herding sheep down here, so it was almost like picking the thing up on a bargain-counter for a penny. There's another little surplus of unearned increment piling up there, 'Tave. I've been thinking of a wedding trip in a yacht with white ribbons tied to the mast, through the Mediterranean, and then up among the Hebrides and down Norway to the ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry

... institution of private property, necessitating, as it does, the transmission to one person of the possessions and earnings of another, always involves the inheritance of unearned power and opportunity. But the point is that in the case of very large fortunes the inherited power goes far beyond any legitimate individual needs, and in the course of time can hardly fail to corrupt its possessors. The creator ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly

... instruction. She had hoped to stir up his industry by showing him the Bible, and promising that when he could read it he should have it for his "very own." But he either could not or would not apply himself, so the prize lay unearned in Thomasina's trunk. But he would listen for any length of time to Scripture stories, if they were read or told him, especially to the history of Elisha, and the adventures ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various

... because of the division of the nucleus and its associates and dependencies between those who work for a living, those who have an unearned income and those parasites who scrounge for a living. They perish because of the hard class and caste lines that grow out of economic contradictions; because of the development of a social pyramid, layer above layer, until the summit is reached where there is standing room for only a few. ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing

... determineth all aright,—bless thou this land, though it wakes to call me traitor. Teach it to know I am innocent. Comfort Hermione, my wife. And restore me to Athens, after doing deeds which wipe out all my unearned shame!" ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis

... long as I have been doing the talking, I may as well continue. We'll keep quiet until we are sure this traitor's men are out of earshot and then we'll take possession of Mr. Nicolas and his unearned gold." ...
— The Boy Allies in the Balkan Campaign - The Struggle to Save a Nation • Clair W. Hayes

... You're not strong enough to stand up under nothing like that. With a few hundred unearned dollars in your pocket you—you'd go up in spontaneous ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst

... were about to spin away in great style from the Compton Arms, one of our tires sighed, and settled down for an unearned rest. But instead of looking black-browed and murderous, as he did when the same thing occurred before, Nick smiled gleefully. He jumped down, and without a word produced a machine exactly like the one his master admired ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... steps to be taken from side to side lies all the meaning of life; people who survey with their heavy eyes of surfeit the free souls of the world! Hypocrites! Pharisees! And to this cage you have consigned my child! and you would make of her, too, a creature of counted paces and of unearned meat! You would shut her in from the life of beauty and freedom that she has known! Ah never! never! there you do not triumph! You have taken her from me; you have won her love; but her mind is not yours; she sees the cage as I do; you do not share the deep things of the soul with her. ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... now—you have got an eye for the rise in values. But I grant you your unearned increment, and you ought to be mighty glad that, to such a time, I'll pay ...
— The Outcry • Henry James

... scented streets, the sedatives of shopping, the joy of lightsome fritters, these things, combined with the job, the unearned cheque and the fear of losing ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus

... gradations or distinctions based upon the size or character of the individual incomes. Nevertheless, the English income tax, besides exempting a minimum, provides for graded reductions or abatements in favor of the possessors of small incomes above the minimum, and for a reduced rate on "unearned" income within certain limits. All this, however, makes necessary a declaration or complete statement of income from the persons claiming the benefit of those provisions, and also necessitates refunding a large ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor

... and the whole family to immediate privations, for which they were unprepared. They were injurious as well as useless and uncalled for, and had a ludicrous side. Acting for Mr. Carey, she dismissed the coachman and the gardener, paying them their month's wages which were unearned. She let the valuable horses take their chance of casual grooming and feeding, till they were sold off. She left the garden at the most critical time of the year, as the old gardener said with tears in ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler

... deter owners from holding unimproved realty, for the purpose of getting the unearned increment made possible by the thrift of their neighbors. In the country it would open up land for cultivation now lying idle, provide homes for more people, cheapen the cost of living to all, and make possible better schools, better ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House

... of the evolutionary process, and to deduce our moral precepts at any given stage by applying our reason to the scrutiny of this process at that stage. This scrutiny is a laborious one; but Truth is the prize of effort in the search therefor, it is not an unearned gift to the ...
— The Basis of Morality • Annie Besant

... himself, for no merits or labours of his own, but merely for having, as Figaro says, taken the trouble to be born. The self-worship of the monarch, or of the feudal superior, is matched by the self-worship of the male. Human beings do not grow up from childhood in the possession of unearned distinctions, without pluming themselves upon them. Those whom privileges not acquired by their merit, and which they feel to be disproportioned to it, inspire with additional humility, are always the few, and the best few. The ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill

... again, and he looked up at Tim with a wicked twinkle in his eye, for he knew, the rascal, what trouble unearned riches bring upon one. Tim emptied his pockets of gold and precious stones, and flung them at the little brogue-maker's ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood

... greater is Thy goodness which Thou hast laid up in store.' But whilst He gives all, the question comes to be: What do I receive? The measure of His gift is His measureless grace; the measure of my reception is my—alas! easily-measured faith. What about the unearned increment? What about the unrealised wealth? Too many of us are like some man who has a great estate in another land. He knows nothing about it, and is living in grimy poverty in a back street. For you have all God's riches waiting for you, and 'the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... article was a description of Durban in Natal. The writer attributed the prosperity of this town to the fact that the suburbs were kept in the hands of the community, instead of being handed over to private owners who would absorb all the unearned increment. Even if this eulogium betrayed exaggeration still a student of civics might feel that the economic conditions of that town were worth studying. Similarly, in New Zealand, the adoption in 1891 of the tax on land values brought prosperity to the ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes

... City had spread two miles beyond the Swamp and Grandson was submerged beneath so much Unearned Increment that he began to speak with what sounded to him like an English Accent and his Shirts were ordered ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade

... bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell—mouths mercy and invented hell—mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness ...
— The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories • Mark Twain

... following Mary Everton's visit I was far enough, I hope, from envying Barrett; far enough, too, from the thought that I might ever venture to ask any good and innocent young woman to step down with me into the abyss of unearned infamy into which I had been flung, largely through the efforts of another woman who was neither good nor innocent. None the less, the delight which was half intoxication remained and the night was full of ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde

... placed in strict subordination to the University by their founders; but, in many cases, their endowment, consisting of land, has undergone an "unearned increment," which has given these societies a continually increasing weight and importance as against the unendowed, or fixedly endowed, University. In Pharaoh's dream, the seven lean kine eat up the seven fat ones. In the reality of historical ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley

... stood loyally between its trader and the prison bars; but the old order had changed in the Northland. Young Lapierre's action was condemned and he was dismissed from the Company's service with a payment of three years' unearned salary whereupon, he promptly turned free-trader, and his knowledge of the methods of the H.B.C., the Indians, and the country, made largely ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx

... In other words, the Canadian seigneur was to be a royal immigration and land agent combined. He was not given his generous landed patrimony in order that he should sit idly by and wait for the unearned increment to come. ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro

... deal is said about the unearned increment from land, especially with a view to the large gains of landlords in old countries. The unearned increment from land has indeed made the position of an English land-owner, for the last two hundred years, the most fortunate that any class of ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner

... list in his harsh animal voice, he refreshed his memory with a coloured stick whereon a notch was made for every item, the woodmen not having come as yet, apparently, to the gentler art of written signs and symbols. Longer and longer that caravan of unearned wealth stretched out before my fancy, but at last it was done, or all but done, and the head envoy, passing the painted stick to a man behind, folded his bare, sinewy arms, upon which the red fell bristles as it does upon a gorilla's, ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold

... she felt sorry for her mistake in arousing false expectations in her cousin, because in the end it might make him all the harder, confirm him in his revolt against life. No, she must find some way out, so that a part of her unearned fortune could be of real ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick

... by the subjugation of large bodies of other human creatures, either as slaves, subject races, or classes; and as the result of the excessive labours of those classes there has always been an accumulation of unearned wealth in the hands of the dominant class or race. It has invariably been by feeding on this wealth, the result of forced or ill-paid labour, that the female of the dominant race or class has in the past lost her activity and has ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner

... in the wage system as the best and most practical means of cooerdinating human effort. What spoils it is the large indigestible lumps of unearned money that, because of laws that originated in special privilege, are injected into the body politic, by inheritance and other ...
— 21 • Frank Crane

... five hundred thousand. It all depends. I'm going to play unearned increment to the limit. People haven't begun to come to California yet. Without a tap of my hand or a turn over, fifteen years from now land that I can buy for ten dollars an acre will be worth fifty, and what I can buy for fifty will ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London

... to see them, and there was nothing to hide in the sympathy that moved Dr. Slavens to reach out and take the girl's hand. He caressed it with comforting touch, as if to mitigate the suffering of her heart, in tearing from it for his eyes to see, her hoarded sorrow and unearned shame. ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden

... to meet its expenses for the year, together with the scheme of taxation proposed, are called the Budget. [3] In all cases where the owner of the land had himself done nothing to produce the rise in value, the Chancellor called that rise the "unearned increment," and held that the owner should be taxed for it accordingly. Most great landowners and many small ones execrate the man who made a practical ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery

... remained in the field of semi-slavery and uncertain barter; in a word, it is still in the feudal stage. The woman gives what she is and has, and nominally she gets protection and support. Sometimes these fail and, on the other hand, she occasionally receives the unearned gifts supposed to befit a potentate or a shrine. As women become educated they find this condition of uncertainty and instability unbearable. They are willing to work, but they must have a chance to think and to plan their lives according to their individual needs. Some degree of economic independence ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes

... Aborigines right and left. He wore the same shirt the year 'round, slept with his dogs and invested his groschens in such Manhattan dirt as he could conveniently transport upon his person. Thus he enabled his aristocratic descendants to wax so fat on "unearned increment" that some of them must forswear their fealty to Uncle Sam and seek in Yewrup a society whose rough edges will not scratch the varnish off their culchah. Mrs. Bradley-Martin does not exactly "look ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... god demand that his anger may be turned away?" asked Quinton Edge. "Doubtless the daily offerings upon which his faithful priests depend for their easy, unearned living. Sides of fat beeves and measures of wheat, not forgetting a cask or two of apple-wine or ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen

... marry Charity he must persuade her over into New Jersey. It did not please Jim to have to follow the example of Zada and Cheever, and it hit him as a peculiar cruelty that he and Charity had to accept not only an unearned increment of scandal in the verdict of divorce, but also a marriage contrary to ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes

... "somebodies" besides the stablemen hung there at all hours of the day, infesting the broad veranda, the barroom and stores, striving to barter the skin of coyote, skunk or beaver, or, when they had nothing to sell, pleading for an unearned drink. Half a dozen of these furtive, beetle-browed, swarthy sons of the prairie lounged there now, as the elder officers and the trader returned, while Blake went on his way, exploring. With downcast eyes he followed the road to and across a sandy watercourse in the low ground, ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King

... concentrated in the narrow area of less than 200,000 square miles, earned yearly returns equal as a rule to the total of the capital invested. Money changed hands rapidly, credits did the work of capital, and the rapid growth of population added large unearned increments to the fortunes of those who owned land or had established ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd

... if men were only kind - Do thou thy part to shape it to those ends, By shaping thine own life to perfectness. Seek nothing for thyself or thine own kin That robs another of one hope or joy, Let no man toil in poverty and pain To give thee unearned luxury and ease. Feed not the hungry servitor with stones, That idle guests may fatten on thy bread. Look for the good in stranger and in foe, Nor save thy praises for the cherished few; And let the weakest sinner find in thee An impetus ...
— Poems of Optimism • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... democracy must be procured without encroaching on the minimum standard of life, and without hampering production. Indirect taxation must therefore be concentrated on those luxuries of which it is desirable that the consumption be discouraged. The steadily rising unearned increment of urban and mineral land ought, by appropriate direct taxation, to be brought into the public exchequer; "the definite teachings of economic science are no longer to be disregarded." Hence incomes are to be taxed above the necessary cost of family ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... acceptance, it would not—even if there were nothing else than this against such proposals—be logically possible, after ousting the peers who are large tax-payers from all control over the finances of the State, to create a new class of voters out of the female representatives of unearned wealth. ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright

... profiteering in particular, but guilty simply as an inheritor. It might have been different if he had come into the money in reasonable instalments, say of five thousand pounds every six months. But a hundred thousand unearned increment at one coup...!) Fortunately the cronies were still in the smoking-room. He swept Bishop from the club, stealthily, swiftly. Bishop had a big ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett

... then were mine unearned By aught, I fear, of genuine desert— Mine, through heaven's grace and inborn aptitudes. 170 And not to leave the story of that time Imperfect, with these habits must be joined, Moods melancholy, fits of spleen, that loved A pensive sky, sad days, and piping winds, The twilight ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth



Words linked to "Unearned" :   unearned revenue, honorary, earned, unearned run, unearned income, unearned increment



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