Mary Harris Jones Quotes

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

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

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

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

The strike of the miners in Arizona was one of the most remarkable strikes in the history of the American labor movement. Its peaceful character, its successful outcome, were due to that most remarkable character, Governor Hunt.

Sometimes it seemed to me I could not look at those silent little figures; that I must go north, to the grim coal fields, to the Rocky Mountain camps, where the labor fight is at least fought by grown men.

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.

Not all the coal that is dug warms the world.

Men’s hearts are cold. They are indifferent.

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

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?

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

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

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 was born in revolution.

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

I have always advised men to read.