Cotton Quotes - page 3
[Meat industry] truly is a disgusting industry, all the more so because it's hidden. Have you ever seen animals being shipped to abattoirs? Do you even know where these abattoirs are? Have you ever seen an animal getting killed for the food you eat? It's a dark, dark, dark trade that nobody really knows about, and a hugely profitable one at that. ... If I don't believe in killing animals, why on earth would I do it for the sake of fashion ... I don't think there's any difference, because at the end of the day you're killing an animal and stripping its skin off its body. It's somebody's baby – or it has a baby – it breathes, it lives, it has emotions, it has feelings ... I find it fascinating that leather and fur are so often associated with the top luxury level of fashion. And yet leather, in this day and age, is probably cheaper than a piece of cotton. So there's such a tiny price put on an animal's life.
Stella McCartney
Now, so far as we may ascribe any great historic result to a single cause, it is the cotton-gin which has thwarted the Constitution and defeated the expectation of our fathers. The cotton-gin - which in seven years saw a crop twenty times as large as before; the cotton-gin, which enabled a man to pick a thousand pounds of cotton in a day instead of one pound - has seemed also to pick the moral perceptions out of the minds of a great many sober and kindly people; to pick all the intention, the spirit, the humanity, the meaning, the very soul, out of the Constitution of the United States, making it not the charter of equal freedom to all who are subject to it, but a mere commercial band by which a part of the population are compelled, directly or indirectly, to hold another part in slavery.
George William Curtis
In the office there are about fifteen people whose attention is directed toward a table covered with the costly fabric [raw cotton]; one man is bent over the table and another is sort of seating on it – the buyer and the broker are discussing a sample. A painting of a vernacular subject, if there is such a thing, and I think by a better hand than most others (a size 40 canvas, I think). I'm planning another less complicated and more surprising yet, better art, in which everyone is in summer dress, the walls white, and a sea of cotton on the tables. (translation based on M. Kay's, in M. Gérin [ed.] and M. Kay, transl. 'Degas letters', Oxford, 1947, pp. 29-30, no. 2.
Edgar Degas