Top 180 Kate Moore Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You fight and you fall and you get up and fight some more. But there will always come a day when you cannot fight another minute more.”

— Kate Moore

2. “And, united, they triumphed. Through their friendships, through their refusal to give up and through their sheer spirit, the radium girls left us all an extraordinary legacy. They did not die in vain. They made every second count.”

— Kate Moore

3. “Radium had been known to be harmful since 1901. Every death since was unnecessary.”

— Kate Moore

4. “Grace Fryer: the girl who fought on when all hope seemed gone; the woman who stood up for what was right, even as her world fell apart. Grace Fryer, who inspired so many to stand up for themselves.”

— Kate Moore

5. “The cynical would say there was only one reason a high-profile specialist finally took up the cause. On June 7, 1925, the first male employee of the United States Radium Corporation died.”

— Kate Moore

6. “The lab workers acknowledged that radium was a dangerous material to handle “unless proper safeguards are provided.”9 Consequently, the men in Radium Dial’s laboratories were provided with them: Kjaer noted that operators were “well-protected by lead screens” and also given vacations from work to limit their exposure.”

— Kate Moore

7. “As Elizabeth put it, “I have neglected no duties, have injured no one, have always tried to do unto others as I would wish to be done by; and yet, here in America, I am imprisoned because I could not say I believed what I did not believe.”

— Kate Moore

8. “Unruly women are always witches, no matter what century we’re in. – Roxane Gay, 20152.”

— Kate Moore

9. “Safety standards only keep you safe if the companies you work for use them.”

— Kate Moore

10. “Not long now. They are words of excitement. Expectation. And reassurance – to those in pain. Not long now.”

— Kate Moore

11. “We’ve got humane societies for dogs and cats, but they won’t do anything for human beings,” he spat out. “These women have souls.”

— Kate Moore

12. “My body means nothing but pain to me,” Grace revealed, “and it might mean longer life or relief to the others, if science had it. It’s all I have to give.”

— Kate Moore

13. “I always stand up for the oppressed.”

— Kate Moore

14. “Essentially, radium had masked itself as calcium and, fooled, the girls’ bodies had deposited it inside their bones. Radium was a silent stalker, hiding behind that mask, using its disguise to burrow deep into the women’s jaws and teeth.”

— Kate Moore

15. “The residue from radium extraction looked like seaside sand, and the company had offloaded this industrial waste by selling it to schools and playgrounds to use in their children’s sandboxes;.”

— Kate Moore

16. “Incessant talking.” “Unusual zealousness.” “Strong will.” These were, in fact, textbook examples of female insanity in the nineteenth century. Doctors frequently saw pathology in female personality.”

— Kate Moore

17. “Sarah wasn’t even in her grave before her former company was denying it was to blame.”

— Kate Moore

18. “What was the first case that you heard of?” asked Berry. “I don’t remember the name,” replied Roeder coldly. The dial-painters weren’t important enough for him to recall such insignificant details.”

— Kate Moore

19. “Radium, they noted, had a “similar chemical nature” to calcium. Thus radium “if absorbed, might have a preference for bone as a final point of fixation.”

— Kate Moore

20. “The decay in Irene’s jaw was eating her alive, bit by bit.”

— Kate Moore

21. “The women had been vindicated. The dial-painters had won. And it was Catherine Wolfe Donohue, in the end, who had led them to victory. “If there are saints on earth,” one commentator said, “and you believe in that, I think Catherine Wolfe Donohue was one of them. I really do.”38 She was buried in St. Columba Cemetery. She has a simple, flat gravestone, as unobtrusive, and as neat and tidy, as she herself had been in life.”

— Kate Moore

22. “Within sixty hours, Sarah’s bones caused exposure on the film: white fog-like patches against the ebony black. Just as the girls’ glow had once done, as they walked home through the streets of Orange after work, her bones had made a picture: an eerie, shining light against the dark.”

— Kate Moore

23. “We put the brushes in our mouths,”16 Katherine said, quite simply. It was a technique called lip-pointing, inherited from the first girls who had worked in the industry, who came from china-painting factories.”

— Kate Moore

24. “In a spookily prophetic letter, Pearl Payne had once written, “My history is unusual and may be of interest to medical men of the future.”14 She could never.”

— Kate Moore

25. “Mr. Packard, I shall not,” Elizabeth said firmly. “It is your own chosen work you are doing. I shall not help you do it.”

— Kate Moore

26. “Wars are hungry machines – and the more you feed them, the more they consume.”

— Kate Moore

27. “There’s no more powerful way to silence someone than to call them crazy. – Holly Bourne 2018.”

— Kate Moore

28. “Insane asylum – a place where insanity is made.”

— Kate Moore

29. “Her whole head was rotting, but she was still alive.”

— Kate Moore

30. “It had taken four years, but Elizabeth Packard had finally been given the insanity trial she had always wanted.”

— Kate Moore

31. “Christmas Day was a sober, solemn occasion after her gruesome experience – but at least they were all together. Given the absences in other New Jersey homes that winter, that was something to be grateful for.”

— Kate Moore

32. “Radium water was drunk by the rich and famous, not working-class girls from Newark.”

— Kate Moore

33. “Every little ache or pain scares them.”5.”

— Kate Moore

34. “The asylum was, in short, a “storage unit for unsatisfactory wives.”19 They’d been, Elizabeth observed archly, “put here, like me, to get rid of them.”

— Kate Moore

35. “The dial-painters’ case ultimately led to the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which now works nationally in the United States to ensure safe working conditions.”

— Kate Moore

36. “Berry wanted them to get justice, but most of all he wanted them to be comfortable in their final.”

— Kate Moore

37. “On June 7, 1925, the first male employee of the United States Radium Corporation died.”

— Kate Moore

38. “Von Sochocky’s breath, as it turned out, contained more radiation than anyone they had tested so far.”

— Kate Moore

39. “The firms that profited from radium medicine were the primary producers and publishers of the positive literature.”

— Kate Moore

40. “What the girls had achieved was astonishing: a ground-breaking, law-changing, and life-saving accomplishment.”

— Kate Moore

41. “Flinn, too, continued on with his work. He had come across a treasure trove of information, supplied to him unwittingly by Katherine Wiley. “I went to see Dr. Flinn,” Wiley later recalled, “and found him most interested. He said that he would be glad to have the names and addresses of all the sick girls that I knew.”8.”

— Kate Moore

42. “That was the year Marguerite Carlough first filed suit in New Jersey and Martland devised his tests. The executives had read Kjaer’s studies, attended the radium conference and seen the Eben Byers story: they knew radium was dangerous.”

— Kate Moore

43. “He had been stunned when he read the covering letter Cecil K. Drinker had enclosed with the report. “We believe that the trouble which has occurred is due to radium,” Drinker had written almost a year ago, on June 3, 1924. “It would, in our opinion, be unjustifiable for you to deal with the situation through any other method of attack.”17.”

— Kate Moore

44. “Married women had no rights to property or even their own wages; their husbands owned it all.”

— Kate Moore

45. “Wiley wasn’t aware that Flinn was working for USRC, for he did not disclose that information. Nor did she know that the firm had “asked Dr. Flinn to see these girls and to give medical advice.”9 And so, with Flinn now having her home address, on December 7, 1925, Katherine Schaub received a letter.”

— Kate Moore

46. “The cynical would say there was only one reason a high-profile specialist finally took up the cause. On June 7, 1925, the first male employee of the United States Radium Corporation died. “The first case that was called to my attention,” Martland later remarked, “was a Dr.”

— Kate Moore

47. “Are we in industry to help carry out some soft, silly, social plan? Are we in industry to buy the goodwill of the employees? No. We are in industry because it is good business.”

— Kate Moore

48. “I must defend myself,” she realized, “or go undefended.”21 Because no one was coming to save her. She had to save herself.”

— Kate Moore

49. “Being sane, I can’t be cured.”

— Kate Moore

50. “Archives show that clitoridectomies to correct “emotional disorder”43 were performed as late as the 1940s.”

— Kate Moore