Kailash Satyarthi Quotes

In India, innocent and poor children are victims of child labor.

I don’t like the work but mother is dead and father brought me down [to the mines.] I had no choice. I have a harness on like a horse and pull carts. Large carts hold seven and a half hundredweight. [750 lbs.]

We need the children of Indonesia and the Philippines to manufacture our freedom of choice.

If there is any matter upon which civilized countries have agreed ... it is the evil of premature and excessive child labor.

To be honest, it was slavery. Nobody should have any romantic ideas about working underground. It's very, very dangerous. You always knew you were living in danger. You were on your hands and knees half the day.

I was always made to work at a very early age. I finished school at 4 P.M. and by 5 P.M. I was working. It was seven days a week.

I was coming home from kindergarten - well they told me it was kindergarten. I found out later I had been working in a factory for ten years. It's good for a kid to know how to make gloves.

No one has the right to threaten the health, education, and well-being of children by involving them in illegal or inappropriate work.

If you keep on buying things made by child slaves in such conditions, you are equally responsible for the perpetration of slavery.

Every hour I spent on manual work, every hour I was humiliated in England or degraded has helped me because that's the same way other people feel in the townships here. People are still walking long distances and are working long hours.

No family should have to depend on the labor of its children to put food on the table and no person should be forced to work in captivity.

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

No child should be born to work at the cost of his childhood and freedom..

The Case Against The Little White Slaver

At the age of five years to enter a spinning-cotton or other factory, and from that time forth to sit there daily, first ten, then twelve, and ultimately fourteen hours, performing the same mechanical labor, is to purchase dearly the satisfaction of drawing breath. But this is the fate of millions, and that of millions more is analogous to it.

I never had a childhood. I started working when I was 7 years old. I got $1 a day getting water for the workers at the sugar cane plant.

Forced labor affects the most vulnerable and least protected people, perpetuating a vicious cycle of poverty and dependency. Women, low-skilled migrant workers, children, indigenous peoples, and other groups suffering discrimination on different grounds are disproportionately affected.

People don't really believe that their computer or sneakers are made by small hands, a child's hands, or a person who is living such a miserable life. They somehow think that, no, that person has a tough life, but it's an OK life.

South Koreans who have seen and praised the mass games should remember the hardship of tearful children. Teachers drive them hard with curses and orders to repeat and repeat. When the children return home in the evening, they can hardly walk.

My first job was with an auto plant, Kansas City - they treated you like slaves. From there I went back to Chicago, worked in steel mills, drove a cab, stuff like that.

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.

New legislation has just been adopted by the International Labour Organization on the Worst Forms of Child Labor, such as bonded labour, prostitution and hazardous work.

Child labor perpetuates poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, population growth, and other social problems.

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?

I pulled cotton at 6 years old and worked on the peanut farm and paper route.