Quotes About Coal Mining

“My dad played for a coal-mining team in eastern Ohio; he was a very good pitcher. If he hadn't hurt his arm, he probably would have got a shot somewhere. He hurt his arm one spring, didn't warm up good enough, couldn't throw a fastball anymore. Another coal miner taught him how to throw the knuckleball.”

— Phil Niekro

“I remember going to see my dad pitch against other coal-mining teams, and he was successful with the knuckleball. I saw how bad guys would look like swinging, and how guys talked about how he could throw every day and didn't hurt his arm. That's how I grew up learning.”

— Phil Niekro

“Agriculture is the most destructive industry that we have. More than coal mining and other extractive industries.”

— Allan Savory

“The coal mining industry is very destructive and it doesn't have to be.”

— Kevin Richardson

“Fiction about mining has a long tradition - Emile Zola's 'Germinal' and Upton Sinclair's 'King Coal' come to mind - and most readers will be aware of the industry's harsh conditions.”

— Floyd Skloot

“My father was a coal hewer from Goldthorpe, a coal-mining village in South Yorkshire. He played for the Yorkshire second team as an opening fast bowler - to me he was a gorgeously heroic man. He helped form a union and closed down the Barnsley seam because it was seeping gas, and saved many, many lives.”

— Brian Blessed

“The commencement of coal mining at Parsa Kente is a milestone event in coal mining sector.”

— Gautam Adani

“In that sense, I became politicized because the people in the coal mining villages who were involved in the struggle knew why they were there. But they couldn't understand why some pop star from London would want to be there.”

— Billy Bragg

“I'm lucky to have a job doing something I really love to do, and I'm happy to accept the pressures of relentless deadlines or reader expectations as necessary evils. It's probably not as stressful as mining coal or leading men into battle.”

— Grant Morrison

“It seems the EPA has worked hard to devise new regulations that are designed to eliminate coal mining, coal burning, usage of coal.”

— Hal Rogers

“My father moved out to Park City in in the mid-'70s and lived in a Winnebago behind a hippie joint called Utah Coal & Lumber that was one of only two or three restaurants at that time. Park City was a sleepy little mining town, with not a condo in sight.”

— Ira Sachs

“My grandfather was from Aberdare. He was a coal miner who emigrated and then continued mining in Pennsylvania.”

— Irwin Thomas

“Then there was the whole concept of coal mining, which is a culture unto itself, the most dangerous occupation in the world, and which draws and develops a certain kind of man.”

— Martin Cruz Smith

“I come from a coal-mining, working-class background. My father was a coal miner.”

— Tom Jones

“But Big Oil and Big Coal have always been as skilled at propaganda as they are at mining and drilling. Like the tobacco industry before them, their success depends on keeping Americans stupid.”

— Jeff Goodell

“My great-grandfather was a coal miner, who worked in Pennsylvania mines when carts were pulled by mules and mines were lit by candles. Mining was very dangerous work then.”

— Tim Murphy

“Coal mining is tough. Acting is just tedious.”

— Johnny Knoxville

“Coal mining is an industry rife with mismanagement, corruption, greed and an almost blatant disregard for the safety, health and quality of life of its work force. Everyone knows this. Everyone has always known it.”

— Tawni O'Dell

“I'm a novelist - not an expert on coal mining. I'm not a politician with an agenda to push. I'm not a reporter presenting facts, and I'm not a sociologist documenting the last struggling remnants of blue-collar America. I'm simply an author who sets her books in coal country because it's where I come from, and it's what I know.”

— Tawni O'Dell

“Growing up I played piano and I sang at a lot of weddings; I grew up in a very small town, a little coal-mining town in Virginia called Grundy. And my family was very sing-songy at home.”

— Jayma Mays

“The son of a Fife mining town sledder of coal-bings, bottle-forager, and picture-house troglodyte, I was decidedly urban and knew little about native fauna, other than the handful of birds I saw on trips to the beach or Sunday walks.”

— John Burnside

“Social Security was designed to give a few years of modest benefits to people whose bodies were worn out through coal mining, factory work and other physically demanding labor.”

— Louis Navellier

“I grew up down in the hills of Virginia. I can be in Kentucky in 20 minutes, Tennessee in 20 minutes or in the state of West Virginia in 20 minutes. And it's down in the Appalachian Mountains, down there. And it's sort of a poorer country. Most of the livelihood is coal mining and logging, working in the woods and things like that. Most people has a hard life down that way.”

— Ralph Stanley

“Not exactly. You see, Portia and I think that the coal miner thing's very overdone. No one will remember you in that. And we both see it has our job to make District 12 tributes unforgettable,' says Cinna.
I'll be naked for sure, I think.
'So rather than focus on the coal mining itself, we're going to focus on the coal,' says Cinna.
Naked and covered in black dust, i think.
'And what do we do with coal? We burn it,' says Cinna. 'You're not afraid of fire, are you, Katniss?' He sees my expression and grins.”

— Suzanne Collins

“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

“Everyone knows that we're doing a science experiment with Earth. And the No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, No. 4 contributors to it are the mining and burning of coal.”

— Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

“The fact that they stole their whole shtick from Woody Guthrie and the coal-mining bards. While the alternative nation meows about personal fashion angst, the Appalachian nation still sings about unemployment.”

— Jim Goad

“Gathering news in Russia was like mining coal with a hat pin.”

— Mary Heaton Vorse

“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

“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish ora German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making "ladies" dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”

— Stephanie Coontz

“The hardest thing I've had to overcome was being from my small coal-mining town of Big Stone Gap, Virginia. My mother was a coal miner for nineteen years, and the expectations of making it out of my town were slim to none.”

— Thomas Jones

“Directing is a nice job. It's the best job for me. If i had to pay money to do it, I would do itIt's problematical. It's disapointing often. It's very challenging. It's frustrating as hell. It's extremely demanding and totally satisfying work. And if I wasn't doing this, I would have to do legitimate work for a living. There are guys out there really working for a living, cleaning streets or coal mining, teaching. Directing is playing. Acting.”

— William Friedkin

“My father got a job at Bradford University in textiles. And he came for - I guess, you know, why do people immigrate? - like, for a better life to find, you know, a new world. And, you know, I think he always - he saw it as an opportunity. And so yeah so we came to this coal mining town in the north of England and that's where I grew up.”

— Aasif Mandvi

“The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don't know - Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel - the quality of philosophy.”

— Doris Lessing

“I report the assault on nature evidenced in coal mining that tears the tops off mountains and dumps them into rivers, sacrificing the health and lives of those in the river valleys to short-term profit, and I see a link between that process and the stock-market frenzy which scorns long-term investments-genuine savings-in favor of quick turnovers and speculative bubbles whose inevitable bursting leaves insiders with stuffed pockets and millions of small stockholders, pensioners, and employees out of work, out of luck, and out of hope.”

— Bill Moyers

“Keeping house is as unpleasant and filthy as coal mining, and the pay's a lot worse.”

— P. J. O'Rourke

“Claiming that the destructive practice of mountaintop removal mining, blowing the tops off mountains to get at the coal beneath, performs the "necessary" function of creating flat land for development To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.”

— Joseph Conrad