Top 180 Kate Moore Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Kate Moore

53. “It’s a book that is set over 160 year ago. A lot has changed. A lot hasn’t. We are only just beginning to appreciate exactly how a person’s powerlessness may lead to struggles with their mental health. With our understanding, statics showing higher rates of mental illness in women, people of color and other disenfranchised groups become translated into truth. NOT a biological deficiency as doctors first thought. But a cultural creation that, if wanted to, we could do something about.”

— Kate Moore

54. “Oh no, the local doctor said, it was definitely not radium poisoning.”

— Kate Moore

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

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

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore

60. “Today, we would call it crowdfunding.”

— Kate Moore

61. “That is the voice of the ghost women speaking not only here in this room but to the world. This voice is going to strike the shackles off the industrial slaves of America. You girls have rights to better laws. That’s what the society is going to work for.”

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore

63. “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

64. “And another patient went further: “INSANE ASYLUM. A place where insanity is made.”23.”

— Kate Moore

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “Even the commissioner of the Department of Labor, Andrew McBride, who had previously seemed reluctant to intervene, now beat the drum of change. He made a personal visit to the Orange studio and asked why the Drinkers’ safety recommendations had not been put into effect; he was informed that the firm “did not agree with them all, many of them had already been followed, and some were impractical.”32.”

— Kate Moore

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

72. “Helen was nervously smoking a cigarette.”

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore

74. “Women’s occupational illnesses, which were often first attributed to female hysteria.”

— Kate Moore

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

79. “She was extremely conscientious and would even take dials home to paint, carefully tracing the numerals in that cramped house next to the railroad tracks that she shared with her large family.”

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore

81. “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

82. “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; kids’ shoes were reported to have turned white because of it, while one little boy complained to his mother of a burning sensation in his hands.”

— Kate Moore

83. “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

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

— Kate Moore

85. “Frances’s father also worked for the firm. Though he was “sure”4 that Frances’s job had killed her, he “did not dare make any kick about it”5 for fear of being sacked. Oh, for such obedient employees.”

— Kate Moore

86. “Is there no man in this crowd to protect this woman?” Rebecca Blessing shouted, pacing the platform. “Is there no man among you? If I were a man, I would seize hold upon her!”

— Kate Moore

87. “I cannot keep my little home.”8 She explained: “I do what I can, but my husband does most of the work.”9.”

— Kate Moore

88. “Radium eats the bone,” an interview with Grace later said, “as steadily and surely as fire burns wood.”

— Kate Moore

89. “Katherine wrote when they first arrived. “I enjoyed that because someone helped me to take it. A maid is a fine thing to have when you are sick.”27.”

— Kate Moore

90. “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

91. “Szamatolski’s opinion, therefore, was a lone, unheard, and hypothetical voice, set against the flamboyant roar of a well-funded campaign of pro-radium literature.”

— Kate Moore

92. “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

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

— Kate Moore

94. “The law did not apply to married women. They could be received at an asylum simply “by the request of the husband.”4 Because married women at that time in the eyes of the law were “civilly dead.”5.”

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore

96. “My husband tries to be brave,” she’d said of him once. “But it’s harder on men than women.”21.”

— Kate Moore

97. “A maid is a fine thing to have when you are sick.”

— Kate Moore

98. “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

99. “The problem, naturally, was the entrenched perspective that all who had been committed to the asylum must be insane, and that any patient who protested her sanity was sicker than the rest.”

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore