Top 50 Mother Jones Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Mourn the dead, fight like hell for the living.”

— Mother Jones

2. “Sit down and read. Educate yourself for the coming conflicts.”

— Mother Jones

3. “Reformation, like education, is a journey, not a destination.”

— Mother Jones

4. “Freedom for the working class!”

— Mother Jones

5. “You ought to be out raising hell. This is the fighting age. Put on your fighting clothes.”

— Mother Jones

6. “The militant not the meek shall inherit the earth!”

— Mother Jones

7. “I’m not a humanitarian, I’m a hell-raiser.”

— Mother Jones

8. “I know that there are no limits to which the powers of privilege will not go to keep the workers in slavery.”

— Mother Jones

9. “I live in the United States, but I do not know exactly where. My address is wherever there is a fight against oppression. My address is like my shoes; it travels with me. I abide where there is a fight against wrong.”

— Mother Jones

10. “I believe that no man who holds a leader’s position should ever accept favors from either side. He is then committed to show favors. A leader must stand alone.”

— Mother Jones

11. “I will tell the truth wherever I please.”

— Mother Jones

12. “My friends, it is solidarity of labor we want. We do not want to find fault with each other, but to solidify our forces and say to each other: We must be together; our masters are joined together and we must do the same thing.”

— Mother Jones

13. “Some day the workers will take possession of your city hall, and when we do, no child will be sacrificed on the altar of profit!”

— Mother Jones

14. “I am not afraid of the pen, or the scaffold, or the sword. I will tell the truth wherever I please.”

— Mother Jones

15. “Little girls and boys, barefooted, walked up and down between the endless rows of spindles, reaching thin little hands into the machinery to repair snapped threads.”

— Mother Jones

16. “If they want to hang me, let them. And on the scaffold I will shout Freedom for the working class!”

— Mother Jones

17. “What one state could not get alone, what one miner against a powerful corporation could not achieve, can be achieved by the union.”

— Mother Jones

18. “No matter what the fight, don’t be ladylike!”

— Mother Jones

19. “The employment of children is doing more to fill prisons, insane asylums, almshouses, reformatories, slums, and gin shops than all the efforts of reformers are doing to improve society.”

— Mother Jones

20. “I am not blind to the shortcomings of our own people.”

— Mother Jones

21. “You must stand for free speech in the streets.”

— Mother Jones

22. “Injustice boils in men’s hearts as does steel in its cauldron, ready to pour forth, white hot, in the fullness of time.”

— Mother Jones

23. “And who is responsible for this appalling child slavery? Everyone.”

— Mother Jones

24. “I believe that movements to suppress wrongs can be carried out under the protection of our flag.”

— Mother Jones

25. “I want to hold a series of meetings all over the country and get the facts before the American people.”

— Mother Jones

26. “In Georgia where children work day and night in the cotton mills they have just passed a bill to protect song birds. What about the little children from whom all song is gone?”

— Mother Jones

27. “I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.”

— Mother Jones

28. “God almighty made women and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies.”

— Mother Jones

29. “My address is like my shoes. It travels with me. I abide where there is a fight against wrong.”

— Mother Jones

30. “Not all the coal that is dug warms the world.”

— Mother Jones

31. “I hope to live long enough to be the great-grandmother of all agitators.”

— Mother Jones

32. “What is a good enough principle for an American citizen ought to be good enough for the working man to follow.”

— Mother Jones

33. “Slowly those who create the wealth of the world are permitted to share it. The future is in labor’s strong, rough hands.”

— Mother Jones

Featured in: Strong Quotes

34. “Life comes to the miners out of their deaths, and death out of their lives.”

— Mother Jones

35. “I have never had a vote, and I have raised hell all over this country. You don’t need a vote to raise hell! You need convictions and a voice!”

— Mother Jones

36. “I would fight God Almighty Himself if He didn’t play square with me.”

— Mother Jones

37. “Men’s hearts are cold. They are indifferent.”

— Mother Jones

38. “I nursed men back to sanity who were driven to despair. I solicited clothes for the ragged children, for the desperate mothers. I laid out the dead, the martyrs of the strike.”

— Mother Jones

39. “I have always advised men to read.”

— Mother Jones

40. “I went West and took part in the strike of the machinists – the Southern Pacific Railroad, the corporation that swung California by its golden tail, that controlled its legislature, its farmers, its preachers, its workers.”

— Mother Jones

41. “I was born in revolution.”

— Mother Jones

42. “I’m not afraid of the press or the Militia.”

— Mother Jones

43. “You know I took an oath to tell the truth when I took the witness stand.”

— Mother Jones

44. “I preferred sewing to bossing little children.”

— Mother Jones

45. “My teachers treated me as a diamond in the rough, someone who needed smoothing.”

— Mother Jones

46. “I am Mother Jones. The Government can’t take my life and you can’t take my arm, but you can take my suitcase.”

— Mother Jones

47. “I am not unaware that leaders betray, and sell out, and play false.”

— Mother Jones

48. “That is, the wife must care for what the husband cares for if he is to remain resolute.”

— Mother Jones

49. “Out of labor’s struggle in Arizona came better conditions for the workers, who must everywhere, at all times, under advantage and disadvantage work out their own salvation.”

— Mother Jones

50. “Sometimes it seemed to me I could not look at those silent little figures; that I must go north, to the grim coal fields, to the Rocky Mountain camps, where the labor fight is at least fought by grown men.”

— Mother Jones