Top 180 Kate Moore Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore

105. “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

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

— Kate Moore

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

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

— Kate Moore

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

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

— Kate Moore

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

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

— Kate Moore

125. “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

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

— Kate Moore

127. “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

128. “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

129. “Fear nothing so much as the sin of simply not doing your duty,” she urged, “in defence of the heaven-born principles of liberty and justice to all humankind.”

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore

131. “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

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

— Kate Moore

133. “When scientists had discovered, at the turn of the century, that radium could destroy human tissue, it was quickly put to use to battle cancerous tumors, with remarkable results.”

— Kate Moore

134. “Theophilus had usurped Elizabeth’s domestic authority and brought another woman into their home. Twenty-three-year-old Sarah Rumsey, one of his most devout parishioners, had moved in, supposedly to help with the household chores. But Sarah was a teacher by trade and came from a wealthy family; Elizabeth knew she was no servant but a spy.”

— Kate Moore

135. “With breathtaking arrogance, McFarland considered asylum superintendents – himself included – “the best men that society can produce.”

— Kate Moore

136. “But over the years, as Theophilus had at various times confiscated her mail, refused her access to her own money, and even removed her from what he deemed the bad influence of her friends, doubts had surfaced. The net he cast about her felt more like a cage than the protection marriage had promised.”

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

141. “Why didn’t their basic humanity compel them to end the practice of lip-pointing?”

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore

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

— Kate Moore

144. “Ever since this thing had blown up in Roeder’s face, there seemed to be nothing but safety recommendations. He had recently instructed Viedt to put some of them into practice: “This is much more economical,” he’d told his deputy in a memo, “than paying $75,000 lawsuits.”25.”

— Kate Moore

145. “Why do you try to injure and destroy my character rather than my opinions?”

— Kate Moore

146. “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

147. “So many doctors across New Jersey were confused that first month of 1924 – but they didn’t share notes, and so each case was viewed in isolation.”

— Kate Moore

148. “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.”

— Kate Moore

149. “But here she learned that New Jersey law was set against the women.”

— Kate Moore

150. “There was just one condition. She would have to return to Theophilus – as his obedient wife. All she had to do to secure her freedom was submit.”

— Kate Moore