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Mary Harris Jones Quotes

Mary G. Harris Jones , known as Mother Jones, was an Irish-born American schoolteacher and dressmaker who became a prominent organized labor representative and community organizer. She helped coordinate major strikes and cofounded the Industrial Workers of the World.

Jones worked as a teacher and dressmaker, but after her husband and four children all died of yellow fever in 1867 and her dress shop was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, she became an organizer for the Knights of Labor and the United Mine Workers union. From 1897, at about 60 years of age, she was known as Mother Jones. In 1902, she was called "the most dangerous woman in America" for her success in organizing mine workers and their families against the mine owners. In 1903, to protest the lax enforcement of the child labor laws in the Pennsylvania mines and silk mills, she organized a children's march from Philadelphia to the home of President Theodore Roosevelt in New York.

✵ 1. August 1837 – 30. November 1930
Mary Harris Jones photo
Mary Harris Jones: 12 quotes2 likes

Famous Mary Harris Jones Quotes

“Your organization is not a praying institution. It's a fighting institution. It's an educational institution along industrial lines. Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living!”

Mary Harris Jones

Source: Autobiography of Mother Jones

“Get it straight, I'm not a humanitarian, I'ma hell-raiser.”

Mary Harris Jones

After being introduced as a "great humanitarian", as quoted in Mother Jones : The Most Dangerous Woman in America‎ (2002) by Elliott J. Gorn, p. 3.

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

Mary Harris Jones

Autobiography of Mother Jones, p. 146 http://books.google.com/books?id=lFFfyG6DPXMC&pg=PA146

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

Mary Harris Jones

Source: Autobiography of Mother Jones, p. 125 http://books.google.com/books?id=lFFfyG6DPXMC&pg=PA125

“Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living!”

Mary Harris Jones

Autobiography of Mother Jones (1925).
Context: Your organization is not a praying institution. It's a fighting institution. It's an educational institution along industrial lines. Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living!

“Christ himself would agitate against them. He would agitate against the plutocrats and hypocrites who tell workers to go down on their knees and get right with God. Christ, the carpenter’s son, would tell them to stand up on their feet and fight for righteousness and justice on earth.”

Mary Harris Jones

Source: Autobiography of Mother Jones

Mary Harris Jones Quotes

“I do not believe that iron bars and brutal treatment have ever been cures for crime. And certainly I feel that in our great enlightened country, there is no reason for going back to middle ages and their form of torture for the criminal.”

Mary Harris Jones

Source: Autobiography of Mother Jones

“I knew it was useless to tell the governor about conditions as I found them. I knew he would be neither interested nor would he care. It wasn’t election time.”

Mary Harris Jones

Source: Autobiography of Mother Jones

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

Mary Harris Jones

Source: Autobiography of Mother Jones

“The old condition is passing away. The new dawn of another civilized nation is breaking into the lives of the human race.”

Mary Harris Jones

Source: Speech in Williamson, WV. (20 June 1920)

“Organized labor should organize its women along industrial lines. Politics is only the servant of industry. The plutocrats have organized their women. They keep them busy with suffrage and prohibition and charity.”

Mary Harris Jones

Source: Autobiography of Mother Jones

“When I get to the otherside, I shall tell God Almighty about West Virginia!”

Mary Harris Jones

Source: Autobiography of Mother Jones

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