Top 180 Kate Moore Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “That was the tragedy. Radium had been known to be.”

— Kate Moore

103. “One dial-painter, known as a “lively Italian girl,”13 painted the material all over her teeth one night before a date, wanting a smile that would knock him dead.”

— Kate Moore

104. “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

105. “Her liberty lay scattered on the railroad track, her reputation for sanity dead beside it.”

— Kate Moore

106. “A lunatic asylum is a grand receptacle for all who are troublesome.”

— Kate Moore

107. “There was nothing hazardous in the paint, the doctors promised:.”

— Kate Moore

108. “Still, at least she could be honest with them: “As to my health,” she wrote bluntly, “I am still a cripple.”24.”

— Kate Moore

109. “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

110. “But no one dared to fight for her.”

— Kate Moore

111. “Almost a year on, the company had not lifted a finger to help her.”

— Kate Moore

112. “Don’t write all this stuff in the papers about our bearing up wonderfully,” Quinta said with a cheeky smile. “I am neither a martyr or a saint.”

— Kate Moore

113. “The Radium Luminous Materials Corporation was expanding massively, and the new site comprised several buildings, all located in the middle of a residential neighborhood.”

— Kate Moore

114. “Her work now, in addition to weighing, was to scrape out the compound from the girls’ dishes, often simply using her fingernails. As was to be expected, her bare hands became ‘luminous bright’, and as it was her habit to run them through her hair her whole head glowed fiercely. If anything, she often thought, when she peered at herself in a mirror in a dark bathroom, the new job got her even more covered in radium than the old one had.”

— Kate Moore

115. “She vowed “that I should never be again found among the class who condemned dancing.”

— Kate Moore

116. “Indeed, she’d recently begun to conceive of her stand for selfhood as “business that God has sent me to do.”

— Kate Moore

117. “I will not suffer humanity to be so abused, as you do here, without lifting my voice against it,” she wrote, “and it will be heard.”

— Kate Moore

118. “Mrs. Donohue, this remnant of a woman, took on her role as president of this strange society,” he later wrote. “She lay motionless, but she was business-like.”

— Kate Moore

119. “On September 2, 2011, the bronze statue for the dial-painters was unveiled by the governor in Ottawa, Illinois. It is a statue of a young woman from the 1920s, with a paintbrush in one hand and a tulip in the other, standing on a clock face. Her skirt swishes, as though at any moment she might step down from her time-ticking pedestal and come to life.”

— Kate Moore

120. “One couldn’t hear the tales of the other women on Seventh Ward and not know that an asylum was not so much a place to treat the sick as a pseudo factory for social control.”

— Kate Moore

121. “She claimed to be better than her husband,” Brown said hurriedly. To a doctor, this would genuinely have seemed insane, given the “scientific” belief of the era that white men were biologically superior to all.”

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore

124. “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

125. “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

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

— Kate Moore

127. “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

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

— Kate Moore

129. “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

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

— Kate Moore

131. “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

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

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

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

— Kate Moore

140. “Sometimes less.” “Yes, sir.” “Sometimes you wouldn’t put the brush in your mouth at all, would you?” he exclaimed, spinning round to deliver the line. She must have hesitated. “You don’t know?” he said incredulously.”

— Kate Moore

141. “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

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

— Kate Moore

143. “With the Civil War aflame, he’d recently started representing war widows struggling to get pensions, often acting without fees.”

— Kate Moore

144. “Records show the women even made their own restraining jackets.”

— Kate Moore

145. “As the firm had actively conducted a campaign to mislead the girls, it should not be allowed to rely upon the delay, which it had caused, as a defense.”

— Kate Moore

146. “If Mrs. Donohue dies before a final ruling,” he said solemnly, “her estate under the law would receive nothing.”20 Perhaps that was why Magid immediately requested a postponement; but it was not granted.”

— Kate Moore

147. “Despite knowing of the cases for so long, Flinn didn’t correct or withdraw his report and allowed it to be printed, giving USRC published expert evidence to draw on in their continued denial of responsibility.”

— Kate Moore

148. “This period of subjection through which woman is passing, is developing her self-reliant character, by compelling her to defend herself.”

— Kate Moore

149. “In many instances it is not insanity, but individuality that caused women to be committed.”

— Kate Moore

150. “I am a martyr for the rights of opinion in woman, in the year 1860, in this boasted, free America”2 she wrote passionately.”

— Kate Moore