Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Mother Jones, referring to Mary Harris Jones

American Labor Activist and Community Organizer

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

"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."

"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!"

"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."

"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!"

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

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

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

"No matter what the fight, don't be ladylike! God almighty made women and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies."

"In spite of oppressors, in spite of false leaders, in spite of labor's own lack of understanding of its needs, the cause of the worker continues onward. Slowly his hours are shortened, giving him leisure to read and to think. Slowly his standard of living rises to include some of the good and beautiful things of the world. Slowly the cause of his children becomes the cause of all. His boy is taken from the breaker, his girl from the mill. Slowly those who create the wealth of the world are permitted to share it. The future is in labor's strong, rough hands."

"I am not blind to the shortcomings of our own people. I am not unaware that leaders betray, and sell out, and play false. But this knowledge does not outweigh the fact that my class, the working class, is exploited, driven, fought back with the weapon of starvation, with guns and with venal courts whenever they strike for conditions more human, more civilized for their children, and for their children's children."

"A lady is the last thing on earth I want to be. Capitalists sidetrack the women into clubs and make ladies of them."

"All the average human being asks is something he can call a home; a family that is fed and warm; and now and then a little happiness; once in a long while an extravagance."

"Goodbye, boys; I'm under arrest. I may have to go to jail. I may not see you for a long time. Keep up the fight! Don't surrender! Pay no attention to the injunction machine at Parkersburg. The Federal judge is a scab anyhow. While you starve he plays golf. While you serve humanity, he serves injunctions for the money powers."

"I abide where there is a fight against wrong."

"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 am not a suffragist, nor do I believe in "careers" for women, especially a "career" in factory and mill where most working women have their "careers." A great responsibility rests upon woman?the training of children. This is her most beautiful task."

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

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

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

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

"I have always advised men to read."

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

"I hope to live long enough to be the great-grandmother of all agitators."

"I know no East or West, North or South, when it comes to my class fighting the battle for justice. If it is my fortune to live to see the industrial chain broken from every workingman's child in America, and if then there is one black child in Africa in bondage, there shall I go."

"I live in the United States but I do not know exactly where. My address is wherever there is a fight against oppression. Sometimes I am in Washington, then in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado. My address is like my shoes: it travels with me."

"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 preferred sewing to bossing little children."

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

"I was born in revolution."

"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 will tell the truth wherever I please."

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

"I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser."

"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."

"Men's hearts are cold. They are indifferent. Not all the coal that is dug warms the world. It remains indifferent to the lives of those who risk their life and health down in the blackness of the earth; who crawl through dark, choking crevices with only a bit of lamp on their caps to light their silent way; whose backs are bent with toil, whose very bones ache, whose happiness is sleep, and whose peace is death."

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

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

"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?"

"No matter what the fight, don?t be ladylike! God almighty made women and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies."

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

"Not all the coal that is dug warms the world."

"Often while sewing for the lords and barons who lived in magnificent houses on the Lake Shore Drive, I would look out of the plate glass windows and see the poor, shivering wretches, jobless and hungry, walking alongside the frozen lake front. The contrast of their condition with that of the tropical comfort of the people for whom I sewed was painful to me."

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

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

"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."

"Taking men into the union is just the kindergarten of their education and every force is against their further education. Men who live up those lonely creeks have only the mine owners' Y.M.C.As, the mine owners' preachers and teachers, the mine owners' doctors and newspapers to look to for their ideas. So they don't get many."