Some day the workers will take possession of your city hall, and when we do, no child will be sacrificed on the altar of profit!
— Mary Harris Jones
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!
I am not an anti to anything which will bring freedom to my class.
Not all the coal that is dug warms the world.
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.
What one state could not get alone, what one miner against a powerful corporation could not achieve, can be achieved by the union.
And who is responsible for this appalling child slavery? Everyone.
I have always advised men to read.
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 am not unaware that leaders betray, and sell out, and play false.
I am not afraid of the pen, or the scaffold, or the sword.
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 am not afraid of the pen, or the scaffold, or the sword. I will tell the truth wherever I please.
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.
Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.
Life comes to the miners out of their deaths, and death out of their lives.
I preferred sewing to bossing little children.
I believe that no man who holds a leader's position should ever accept favors from either side. He is then committed to show favors. A leader must stand alone.
The miners lost because they had only the constitution. The other side had bayonets. In the end, bayonets always win.
You must stand for free speech in the streets.
Men's hearts are cold. They are indifferent.
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.
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.
I would fight God Almighty Himself if He didn't play square with me.
Today the white child is sold for two dollars a week to the manufacturers.
I am not blind to the shortcomings of our own people.
God almighty made women and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies.
I abide where there is a fight against wrong.
My teachers treated me as a diamond in the rough, someone who needed smoothing.
Whatever your fight, don't be ladylike.
That is, the wife must care for what the husband cares for if he is to remain resolute.
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.
Reformation, like education, is a journey, not a destination.
If they want to hang me, let them. And on the scaffold I will shout Freedom for the working class!
I am Mother Jones. The Government can't take my life and you can't take my arm, but you can take my suitcase.
I want to hold a series of meetings all over the country and get the facts before the American people.
What is a good enough principle for an American citizen ought to be good enough for the working man to follow.
I believe that movements to suppress wrongs can be carried out under the protection of our flag.
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'm not afraid of the press or the Militia.
You know I took an oath to tell the truth when I took the witness stand.
I will tell the truth wherever I please.
Sit down and read. Educate yourself for the coming conflicts.
My address is like my shoes. It travels with me.
My address is like my shoes. It travels with me. 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.
I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser.
I was born in revolution.
