Top 180 Kate Moore Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Mary Jane, aged just three, said hers in “a tiny piping voice”22 that carried through the quiet house. As her mother lay downstairs – perhaps, to her young mind, merely sleeping – Mary Jane prayed as she had always learned to do. “God bless Mommie and Daddy.”

— Kate Moore

52. “Because in the nineteenth century – and beyond – women were supposed to be calm, compliant angels. They were even encouraged, for their health, to endeavor “to feel indifferent to every sensation.”

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore

54. “The girls,” remembered a local resident of the time, “were ‘good Catholic girls’ who were raised not to challenge authority.”

— Kate Moore

55. “The law gave him power “to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement.”

— Kate Moore

56. “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

57. “And yes, they called her crazy. But if that’s crazy, we should stand back and admire. For just look at what “crazy” can do.”

— Kate Moore

58. “Just think!” Elizabeth later exclaimed. “Forty men and women clubbed together to get me imprisoned just because I chose to think my own thoughts, and speak my own words!”

— Kate Moore

59. “I agree not to be connected with, directly or indirectly, any other cases against the United States Radium Corporation, nor to render assistance to any persons in any actions against said Company, nor to furnish data or information to any such persons in matters against said Company.”

— Kate Moore

60. “The company was also likely familiar with Flinn’s work with the Ethyl Corporation in early 1925, when the doctor had been hired to find evidence that leaded gas was safe.”

— Kate Moore

61. “Dr. Flinn, who pronounced that his tests showed “there is no radium”28 in the women; he was convinced, he said, that their health problems were caused by nerves. This was a common response to women’s occupational illnesses, which were often first attributed to female hysteria. The World, for one, was utterly unconvinced.”

— Kate Moore

62. “She had “suffered so frightfully that her mind seemed affected.”

— Kate Moore

63. “The doctors put her in a room, laid her down on a bed. She pushed and pushed when they told her to. She felt the baby move through her, felt it as her baby came. Her son. She felt him, but Albina never heard him cry. Her baby was born dead.”

— Kate Moore

64. “With a half-life of 1,600 years, radium could take its time to make itself known.”

— Kate Moore

65. “Helen was nervously smoking a cigarette.”

— Kate Moore

66. “Why should I be so afflicted?” she would later ask. “I have never harmed a living thing. What have I done to be so punished?”

— Kate Moore

67. “The firm had employed over one thousand women during its lifetime; four deaths from such a number was probably to be expected. The company therefore concluded confidently: “We do not recognize that there is any such hazard in the occupation.”3.”

— Kate Moore

68. “In all, they saw an illness that they knew not how to treat, although they never let the girls see their perplexity; the dial-painters would never have had the audacity to question them anyway.”

— Kate Moore

69. “The mainstream position as understood by most people was that the effects of radium were all positive;.”

— Kate Moore

70. “Reed swore “he never told anyone, nor ever heard anyone tell, Catherine Donohue or other employees radium wouldn’t hurt them.”

— Kate Moore

71. “Judge William Clark was a hugely respected man. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth – he was the grandson of a senator; the family estate was called Peachcroft –.”

— Kate Moore

72. “That class of men who wish to rule woman, seem intent on destroying her reason.”

— Kate Moore

73. “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. Leman.”7.”

— Kate Moore

74. “Because married women at that time in the eyes of the law were “civilly dead.”5 They were not citizens, they were shadows:.”

— Kate Moore

75. “New Jersey was nicknamed the Garden State for its high agricultural production, but in truth it was just as productive industrially.”

— Kate Moore

76. “No one heeded the warnings of Thomas Edison, working just a few miles away in sight of the Orange plant, who once remarked, ‘There may be a condition into which radium has not yet entered that would produce dire results; everybody handling it should have a care.”

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore

78. “It was no coincidence that the word hysteria, in fact, derives from the ancient Greek for uterus.”

— Kate Moore

79. “It is an offense against Morals and Humanity,” he concluded, “and, just incidentally, against the law.”

— Kate Moore

80. “Night and rainy days are the worst times.”

— Kate Moore

81. “The state, in fact, had somewhat pioneering legislation; a new law had come in only that January that made industrial diseases compensable. But – and it was a big but – only nine diseases were on the permitted list, and there was a five-month statute of limitations, meaning any legal claim had to be filed within five months of the point of injury.”

— Kate Moore

82. “Tom would later confide that she “cries but rarely smiles; she has forgotten how to laugh.”11.”

— Kate Moore

83. “After seeing several girls in the dental office,” Martland later wrote, “I lost interest in the matter.”

— Kate Moore

84. “Blum was worth his money. Later, he would try to find out the exact chemicals in the luminous paint, although to no avail.”

— Kate Moore

85. “As for Katherine Schaub, nobody even saw her anymore: she stayed at home and refused to go out. “While other girls are going to dances and the theatres and courting and marrying for love,” Katherine said mournfully, “I have to remain here and watch painful death approach. I am so lonely.”5 She left the house only to attend church. While Katherine had not been especially religious before, she now pronounced, “You don’t know what a consolation I obtain from going to mass.”

— Kate Moore

86. “Three long years of false imprisonment does not satisfy this lust for power,” she raged. “No – nothing but a life-long entombment.”

— Kate Moore

87. “She had been concerned before about the lack of treatment for those who were genuinely mentally ill. But this course he had now prescribed went the other way. As one patient put it, most of the doctors that are employed in lunatic asylums do much more to aggravate the disease than they do to cure it.”

— Kate Moore

88. “Chart showing the supposed causes of insanity in those admitted to the Jacksonville asylum – including three patients admitted for “novel reading.”

— Kate Moore

89. “USRC executives decided to launch an investigation to determine if there was anything dangerous in the work. For too long there had been rumor and suspicion; it couldn’t continue. After all – now, it was bad for business.”

— Kate Moore

90. “To offend such a prestigious institution as USRC would not be wise.”

— Kate Moore

91. “Theo Sr. had saved up money to buy a house for his old age, but he now offered some of his savings to his son for Hazel’s treatment.”

— Kate Moore

92. “The physicians moaned heartily about her behind her back:.”

— Kate Moore

93. “The amount of radium in the paint may have been small, but by the time you had been swallowing it every single day for three or four or five years in a row, there was enough there to cause you damage – particularly when, as the Drinkers had already realized, radium was even more potent internally, and headed straight for your bones.”

— Kate Moore

94. “It is no uncommon thing to receive a blow for a kiss.”

— Kate Moore

95. “Gods can be kind. Loving. Benevolent. Yet as the playwright George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “The gods of old are constantly demanding human sacrifices.”

— Kate Moore

96. “The pictures of her skull, meanwhile, with her jawbone missing, made her mouth stretch unnaturally wide, as though she was screaming – screaming for justice through all these years. There was a smudge of dark where her eye had once been, as though she was looking out, staring accusingly, setting straight a lie that had blackened her name.”

— Kate Moore

97. “September 2, 2011, as Radium Girls Day in Illinois, in recognition of the tremendous perseverance, dedication, and sense of justice the radium girls exhibited in their fight.”93.”

— Kate Moore

98. “In the nineteenth century, doctors were certain that women’s menstrual cycles made them liable, indeed likely, to go mad, despite no confirmatory scientific evidence.”

— Kate Moore

99. “If the prisoner could but know for how long a time he must suffer this incarceration,” one of Elizabeth’s friends wrote, “it would be a wonderful relief. Then the Superintendent could not perpetuate it at his own option, as he now can and does.”10.”

— Kate Moore

100. “In time, its critics would declare it a “misfortune for science”8 that the idea was ever pursued at all.”

— Kate Moore