Top 44 Mary Harris Jones Quotes

My teachers treated me as a diamond in the rough, someone who needed smoothing.

Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.

And who is responsible for this appalling child slavery? Everyone.

In Georgia where children work day and night in the cotton mills they have just passed a bill to protect song birds. What about the little children from whom all song is gone?

Reformation, like education, is a journey, not a destination.

Today the white child is sold for two dollars a week to the manufacturers.

If they want to hang me, let them. And on the scaffold I will shout Freedom for the working class!

I am not afraid of the pen, or the scaffold, or the sword.

I want to hold a series of meetings all over the country and get the facts before the American people.

That is, the wife must care for what the husband cares for if he is to remain resolute.

Out of labor’s struggle in Arizona came better conditions for the workers, who must everywhere, at all times, under advantage and disadvantage work out their own salvation.

I have never had a vote, and I have raised hell all over this country. You don’t need a vote to raise hell! You need convictions and a voice!

Whatever your fight, don’t be ladylike.

I am Mother Jones. The Government can’t take my life and you can’t take my arm, but you can take my suitcase.

Little girls and boys, barefooted, walked up and down between the endless rows of spindles, reaching thin little hands into the machinery to repair snapped threads.

I was born in revolution.

The miners lost because they had only the constitution. The other side had bayonets. In the end, bayonets always win.

Sit down and read. Educate yourself for the coming conflicts.

You know I took an oath to tell the truth when I took the witness stand.

I have always advised men to read.

I learned in the early part of my career that labor must bear the cross for others’ sins, must be the vicarious sufferer for the wrongs that others do.

I believe that movements to suppress wrongs can be carried out under the protection of our flag.

I am not unaware that leaders betray, and sell out, and play false.

I went West and took part in the strike of the machinists – the Southern Pacific Railroad, the corporation that swung California by its golden tail, that controlled its legislature, its farmers, its preachers, its workers.

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

I nursed men back to sanity who were driven to despair. I solicited clothes for the ragged children, for the desperate mothers. I laid out the dead, the martyrs of the strike.

I am not afraid of the pen, or the scaffold, or the sword. I will tell the truth wherever I please.

What one state could not get alone, what one miner against a powerful corporation could not achieve, can be achieved by the union.

I am not an anti to anything which will bring freedom to my class.

Men’s hearts are cold. They are indifferent.

I would fight God Almighty Himself if He didn’t play square with me.

You must stand for free speech in the streets.

I will tell the truth wherever I please.

I’m not a humanitarian, I’m a hell-raiser.

My address is like my shoes. It travels with me. I abide where there is a fight against wrong.

What is a good enough principle for an American citizen ought to be good enough for the working man to follow.

I am not blind to the shortcomings of our own people.

I abide where there is a fight against wrong.

Injustice boils in men’s hearts as does steel in its cauldron, ready to pour forth, white hot, in the fullness of time.

Not all the coal that is dug warms the world.

I’m not afraid of the press or the Militia.

Life comes to the miners out of their deaths, and death out of their lives.

God almighty made women and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies.

I preferred sewing to bossing little children.