Florence Kelley

“To live means to buy, to buy means to have power, to have power means to have duties.”

“Why are seals, bears, reindeer, fish, wild game in the national parks, buffalo, and migratory birds all found suitable for federal protection, but not children?”

“We have, in this country, two million children under the age of sixteen years who are earning their bread.”

“The right to childhood is a fundamental right of children.”

“Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the poverty of the parent, you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time.”

“What we prepare for is what we shall get.”

“The business of minimizing unemployment is not a private affair. It is a public one.”

“The sweated trades recognize no sex, no age, no skill. They are the last resort of the inefficient, the unfortunate, and the greedy.”

“Legislation can be a powerful instrument of social change.”

“For the sake of the children, for the Republic, for the future of our race, let us strive to make this country a better place to live in.”