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

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

— Kate Moore

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

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

— Kate Moore

58. “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

59. “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

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

— Kate Moore

61. “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

62. “Being sane, I can’t be cured.”

— Kate Moore

63. “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

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

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore

66. “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

67. “Helen was nervously smoking a cigarette.”

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

73. “The girls shone “like the watches did in the darkroom,” as though they themselves were timepieces, counting down the seconds as they passed. They glowed like ghosts as they walked home through the streets of Orange.”

— Kate Moore

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

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

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore

81. “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

82. “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

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

— Kate Moore

84. “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

85. “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

86. “I am fully determined never to return to my husband again, of my own free-will.”

— Kate Moore

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

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

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore

95. “He didn’t send the full report, which was lengthy, simply a table of the medical-test results of the workers, which showed the employees’ blood to be “practically normal.”14 “I do not believe,” wrote Viedt confidently, “that this table shows a condition any different than a similar examination would show of the average industrial worker.”15 The department agreed: the table showed that “every girl is in perfect condition.”16.”

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore

97. “Peg started out, as did all the new girls, by painting the Big Ben alarm clocks that Westclox produced. He was “a rugged handsome fellow”9 of a clock, with a dial that measured about 10 centimeters across, giving him nice big numbers for the less experienced girls to paint.”

— Kate Moore

98. “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

99. “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

100. “The nineteenth-century medical notes of supposed madwomen place particular emphasis on their appearance. An unbuttoned blouse, an undone bun, or even simple carelessness of dress was considered damning evidence a woman’s mind roamed free from its moorings.”

— Kate Moore