labor-activists

"Being in a mixed science school is the ultimate test of your survival."

"When my first results came, Eighty per cent of the girls had between A and B-. Soon the girls were writing to tell me that though they admired my work, they felt I was destined for bigger things."

"My spirit is not banned — I still say I want freedom in my lifetime."

"A pass is this little book you must get when you are 16, and it says where you can work, and where you can be, and if you have got work. You can't get a job without this book. And you can only get a job where they stamp your pass to say 'Johannesburg' or 'Pretoria' and so on. You must carry it with you all the time because the police can ask you, 'Where is your pass?' any time, and then you must show them. If you haven't got your pass, they put you in jail for some days or else you must pay some money to get out."

"I don't know what you mean by "tired". I can't give up because the spirit is still there. I can't help it, even if I wanted to give up. Although I can't do everything physically, the spirit still wants what I have always wanted."

"1959 was declared Anti-Pass Year by the ANC in honour of the women because we fought so bravely against the passes"

"Greed and hypocrisy are indeed inseparable companions. ("To a Young Girl Graduate")"

"Irene Paull was a great person, as these selections of her writings make clear. She had no pretensions and great honesty with herself and others. If the world is still here in a hundred years, it will be because of people like her."

"The time was the era shortly after the First World War when waves of post-war immigration carried to the new world like rotting bilge water all the bitter hatreds, prejudices and venoms of Tsarist Russia and Poland."

"History itself is the only arbiter of "dangerous thoughts" and to whom they are dangerous. For the world does move. Men's thoughts change as the times change. You can no more freeze the thoughts of mankind than you can stop the earth from moving on its axis, than you can freeze a lovely face into eternal youth. To try to do this is not only to make a mockery of democracy, it is to stop the movement of progress and to whip up a fierce tide of reaction. Who should have the right to determine that another man's thoughts are "dangerous"? ("Jailed for her Thoughts")"

"From the labor movement of the 1930s to the the civil rights, peace, and women's movements of the 1950s through the 1970s, Irene Paull conveys the richness of ethnic, working-class and oppositional cultures within the fortress of America. Her voice rings as true as it did sixty years ago."

"Irene Paull is a voice of our time, of all the struggles, of the wars and depressions. Early she protested the violent, oppressed life of the Duluth harbor and the timber industry, the anti-Semitism, the exploitation of the immigrants in labor. She became a voice of the people, collecting the poems of lumberjacks."

"Uneasy is the head that wears a crown. ("Justice in Connor's Kingdom")"

"Irene Paull worked against injustice all her life, and part of that work was her exquisite writing"

"Irene Paull was an intensely feminine, brilliantly intelligent and morally passionate woman. The privilege of publishing her stories in Jewish Currents, and the luxury of the friendship I enjoyed with her (mostly through her remarkable letters), have been among the ornaments of my personal and professional life."

"The independent strong woman was a bad woman, even in the radical press. Irene and I had a vision of the free new woman growing in her own pattern-a new crop, new protein, new communication, new connections, new conceptions-birthing out of terrible hunger and anger."

"The ones we love are like lighted candles in our being. When one goes out, it leaves a part of us in darkness. I have a duty to perform, grappling with the darkness where once you used to be-a duty to you and to all youth like you born into a world of poverty and depression and war, a world which seems to have no present and no future. I have a monument to build to your memory...a better society where youth can blossom to its rich fulfillment. Goodbye, little sister! Thousands of crushed and broken youth lie like you in their needless graves, youth who had no present, and saw no future. But millions of us have set our teeth against the wind. The working class is moving toward a happier world where its beloved children will not be gnarled and twisted and broken, but will grow straight as the young trees straining towards the sun. ("She who Died Without Living")"

"Hatred springs from uncertainty and fear."

"Woe to our memory if it can be said by unhappy future generations that we defeated Hitler and Mussolini, only to lay down arms to the Hoovers, the Vandenbergs, the Wheelers, Hearsts, Knutsons, and McCormicks of America. If we allow Germany to be built up again as a bulwark against the Soviet Union, if we permit American cooperation to be transformed into American imperialism-woe to our memory if we allow the seeds of a third world war to be planted under our victorious feet!"

"We're shaping software and the software is shaping us. It's a circle."

"Soften; Lighten; Quiet; Shrink. Conceal the bridge; Your ancestors built— A lady’s nose (like her mind) Must be petite. Blonde the mane, Straighten the curls— Her hair’s much too loud And fills space not for girls. Alter the foundation, Uproot olive for blush— Make light of those shadows, A woman’s face speaks none. Soften; Whiten; Quiet; Shrink."

"Established order, being an instituted fixity, excludes reform, and whoever advocates change by that very act becomes an enemy to it."

"To my mind, the very assumption of “natural rights” is at war with evolution."

"Dyer D. Lum proposed the creation of "co-operative homes," and Voltairine de Cleyre later elaborated the idea: "I would destroy the individual 'home' with its waste of forces and have instead magnificent palaces, spacious grounds. . swimming rooms, bathrooms, everything on a large scale," yet with private rooms for every individual whenever he or she desired to be alone."

"Events are the true schoolmasters, and smarting under the White terror which yearly sacrifices its millions the Social Revolutionist does not hesitate to invoke the Red terror, knowing that here the words apply that “he who loseth his life shall save it.” But how? By words of rodomontade? By inviting others to do by simply preaching the gospel of discontent? No; but by deeds. The Social Revolutionist is not moved by revenge nor by mere impulse. When Alexander II was killed, when Cavendish and Burke were sent to judgment, when John Brown shot men he had never before met, the world understood the full significance of each act."

"Social intercourse has slowly evolved the Ideal that peace, happiness and security are best attained by equal freedom to each and all; consequently, I can lay no claim in equity to a privilege, for that which all alike may enjoy ceases to be privileged. The important deduction from social evolution is that as militancy has weakened and industrialism widened its boundaries, liberty has ever tended toward such equalization, Privilege finds sanction in equity as right, because it violates the ideal of social progress — equality of opportunities."

"The wisest government is that which but responds readiest to the demand to which its own establishment had given birth, and for this reason will yield only as forced by fear to give something rather than risk losing all."

"Is not the whole long career of the proletariat but the “Martyrdom of Man” strewn with whitened bones, cemented with scalding tears welling up from broken hearts, and stained with the bleeding feet of countless millions?"

"Until my imprisonment I had believed that except for Albert Parsons, Dyer D. Lum, Voltairine de Cleyre, and a few others America was barren of idealists. Her men and women cared only for material acquisitions, I had thought. John Swinton's account of the liberty-loving people who had been and still were in every struggle against oppression changed my superficial judgment."

"Precisely as water flows to a level when obstructions are removed, just so will social relations flow to equitable conditions when restrictions are swept away. And precisely also as liberty comes in does the assertion of “rights” go out."

"That is mutualism, a noble mission of truth, sublime and holy mission mission of charity that nations ignore or have forgotten; nations, whose workers are dispersed, segregated, strangers to each other, and . . . how many times, sad to say, more than strangers, subject to ruinous enmities, that workers’ element divides instead of seeking [union], becomes offended instead of giving aid and, no, rejects with hatred its own [members] , rather than embracing [all workers] with love; [workers] reject each other without seeing that their blood and their anguish kneaded together become the bitter bread that they devour together; without seeing that their arms are what sustain the industry of nations, their richness and their greatness."

"twenty-four years of joining souls through the principle of humanity, through the sentiment of innate altruism in the heart, and altruism that permits us to fulfill our obligation to our beloved comrade"

"Mutualism needs the vigor of struggle and the firmness of conviction to advance in its unionizing effort; it needs to shake away the apathy of the masses, and enchain with links of abnegation the passions that rip apart its innermost being; it needs hearts that say: I am for you, as I want you to be for me; mutualism has need of us workers, the humble, the small gladiators of the idea, it needs for us to salvage from our egotisms something immense, something divine, that can make us a society ,that can make us nobly human. And the worker should not think of his humbleness, nr of his insignificance, he should not reason that he is unimportant and so remove himself discouraged from the social concert. What does it matter that he is but an atom, what does it matter? The atoms invisible for their smallness are the only elements of the universe."

"Twenty-four years of noble struggle against so many morbid germs that would annihilate the collective effort, that terribly and vilely devote themselves to devouring mutualism"

"The worker is the arm, the heart of the world."

"Tejana socialist labor leader and political activist Sara Estela Ramirez would not live to participate in El Primer Congreso Mexicanista held the following year. Ramirez's ideas, however, would resonate in the words of her compañeras. Composed of South Texas residents, this Congreso was the first civil rights assembly among Spanish-speaking people in the United States. With delegates representing community organizations and interests from both sides of the border, its platform addressed discrimination, land loss, and lynching. Women delegates, such as Jovita Idar, Soldedad Peña, and Hortensia Moncaya, spoke to the concerns of Tejanos and Mexicanos."

"At the turn of the century, Sara Estela Ramírez, the Villarreal sisters, Leonor Villegas de Magnón, Jovita Idar and the staff members of La Voz de la Mujer and Pluma Roja were organic intellectuals of their times who revealed different discursive positionings of women within their societies, positionings informed by the master narratives of nationalism, religion and anarchism. Until now these women's work as publishers and their written contributions have remained virtually unrecognized. Either because of political affiliations or gender discrimination, their work has not been recognized in Mexico. In the United States, these factors, as well as linguistic biases, have relegated their work to oblivion. These women's stories and their publishing efforts, nonetheless, capture the realities of a people, the significance of whose daily existence transcends the limitations imposed by political and national borders."

"it is to him, untiring and tenacious struggler, that the future of humanity belongs. May you, beloved workers, integral part of human progress, yet celebrate, uncounted anniversaries, and with your example may you show societies how to love each other so that they may be mutualists and to unite so that they may be strong."

"The U.S. -Mexico borderland saw mexicanas fighting for the revolution, often with the PLM, and also to win justice for tejanos. They included Sara Estela Ramírez, who lived in Laredo and became known to thousands of tejanos as a labor organizer, human rights activist and poet. She launched a revolutionary feminist newspaper, Aurora, in 1904. She died in 1910 at the age of 29 but her unique, visionary poetry rings true today."

"every...act should be an expression of the God, or goodness, in us."

"Social welfare—that's the chief interest I have ever had. People are wrong in thinking that the best incentive is competition. Competition is good, but only as the instrument for the common good."

"men should look into their own lives, see their many doings, their sins (if you will), repent of them, [and] lead bettter lives than [in] their past."

"It is so obvious that to treat people equally is the right thing to do."

"I wondered why people made speeches in favor of something so obviously right,...Women breathed the same air, got the same education; it was ridiculous, spending so much energy and elocution on something rightfully theirs."

"Being finite ourselves, we human beings cannot know God directly, but only through the phenomena, or manifestations of God in our universe. These manifestations range from the distant world of the milky way to the tiniest blade of grass, from the vast oceans to the dew drop, from the grandest mountain to the soft skin of a baby's cheek; they include every act of kindness and generosity and sacrificial devotion of a human being to another human being, the love of a man for his wife, the love of a mother for her child. They include our very search for God—They include all the beauty and the glory and the mystery of the universe around us and within us. The more we grow in wisdom and in the understanding of these things, the more nearly we can approach to a knowledge of God."

"The trouble has been that society has neglected its members."

"Should we not consider a yearly minimum wage on the average?"

"We know it takes years and years to drill into a girl the absolute necessity for organization, the value of organization, and I am not pessimistic. I know that working girls are awakening to the necessity for organization, but how about those trades where no attempt has as yet been made to organize them? In the meantime the girls are absolutely starved."

"A working woman is a human being, with a heart, with desires, with aspirations, with ideas and ideals, and when we think of food and shelter we merely think of the actual necessities to cover her body and to feed her. But what about the other things? Have we thought of providing her with books, with money for amusements, and when I speak of amusements I do not speak of the five cent picture shows, I speak of amusements that a girl should go to — a good drama or refined vaudeville — few think about that. Have you thought about a girl providing herself with a good room that had plenty of air, proper ventilation, in a somewhat decent neighborhood. Do you think of all these things when we speak of a minimum wage? Do you want a girl to have a nice comfortable room?"

"When war and human sacrifice of the many have been banished, as that of the individual has been, eyes will be opened and ears unstopped, and men and women will understand all the wrongs of Society, and work together, nations with nations."