Top 180 Kate Moore Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Night and rainy days are the worst times.”

— Kate Moore

102. “In 1978, researchers exhumed Peg’s body from St. Columba Cemetery, where she had been resting alongside her parents. They discovered she had 19,500 microcuries of radium in her bones – one of the highest quantities found. It was more than 1,000 times the amount scientists then considered safe.”

— Kate Moore

103. “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

104. “Catherine Wolfe, fired for being sick, swung open the glass door at the entrance of the studio. It was six steps down to the sidewalk, and on every one she felt her hip ache. Nine years she had given them. It had meant nothing.”

— Kate Moore

105. “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

106. “Archives show that clitoridectomies to correct “emotional disorder”43 were performed as late as the 1940s. The last recorded case was on a five-year-old girl.”

— Kate Moore

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

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

— Kate Moore

111. “The executives of the Radium Dial Company had confirmed knowledge of radium poisoning since at least 1925, less than three years after their studio first opened in Ottawa.”

— Kate Moore

112. “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

113. “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

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

— Kate Moore

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Kate Moore

118. “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

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

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore

122. “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

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

— Kate Moore

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

127. “Neither Peg nor any of her tested coworkers were told the results.”

— Kate Moore

128. “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

129. “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

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

— Kate Moore

131. “I instructed them,” she said, “to put the brush in their mouth.”12.”

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore

133. “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

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

— Kate Moore

135. “O, Dr. McFarland,” she said with patronizing clarity, “you cannot kill a spirit; it lives after all you have done to destroy its existence.”

— Kate Moore

136. “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

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

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore

139. “It seemed wealthy consumers were much more worthy of protection than working-class girls; after all, dial-painting was still going on, even in 1933.”

— Kate Moore

140. “As he’d noted in his letter to Theophilus, Elizabeth had a truly brilliant mind – and that made her dangerous.”

— Kate Moore

141. “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

142. “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

143. “Atomic energy remained part of the world; it is a part of our lives even today, when 56 countries operate 240 nuclear reactors, and more still are used to power nuclear ships and submarines. Yet thanks to the radium girls, whose experiences led directly to the regulation of radioactive industries, atomic power is able to be operated, on the whole, in safety.”

— Kate Moore

144. “While women had proven that they could study on an intellectual level, doctors lamented that the choice made them highly susceptible to “derangements of the nervous system.”6 The problem was that when “minds of limited capacity to comprehend subjects”7 tried to do so, it ultimately led to mental breakdown. That.”

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore

146. “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

147. “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

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. “Berry even learned that Clark “is, or was, up to a very recent time, a stockholder in USRC.”28.”

— Kate Moore

150. “He couldn’t see what else he could do. He did ask others for help, consulting a highly skilled Newark physician, Dr. Harrison Martland. But when Martland examined the girls, he too was puzzled. “After seeing several girls in the dental office,” Martland later wrote, “I lost interest in the matter.”

— Kate Moore