Billie Holiday Quotes

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.

The hard part that I had to go through in life, period, is living in poverty and not being able to get what I want.

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?

There are children who are working in textile businesses in Asia who would be prostitutes on the streets if they did not have those jobs.

Whatever happened to the good ole days, when children worked in factories?

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.

It Is Not Linen You're Wearing Out But Human Creatures' Lives.

Nobody wants to sell their child, but what they wind up doing is selling their child to be able to support their family.

I never saw the light of day at Bouley. I remember I would bring home a roll of toilet paper a week because we got paid so little, if at all.

My great grandmother, Martha, was hired at 11 years old to be a worker to people.

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.

How fared the Irish artisan—how fared the Irish peasant? Where one pined, as he yet pines, in your beggared cities, the other starves, upon your fruitful soil.

And the children? Twelve hours of work for children! 0, misery. But not all the Jules Simon of the Academy of Moral and Political Science, not all the Germanys of Jesuitism, could have invented a vice more degrading to the intelligence of the children, more corrupting of their instincts, more destructive of their organism than work in the vitiated atmosphere of the capitalist factory

Increase of slaves in this colony is injurious to the poor and inconvenient

The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester

The mill-owners obtained their wealth by overworking and by defrauding the factory children. They were praying people, but took care their work people should neither have time nor strength to pray. These hypocrites pretended it was necessary to keep these poor infant slaves at this excruciating labour just to preserve them from "bad company" and to prevent them learning "bad habits".

I see tens of millions of its citizens--a substantial part of its whole population--who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life.

Workrooms were often overcrowded, dirty, ill-ventilated, and insufficiently heated. The employment of little errand girls, usually only 14 years of age… Their work was very varied – running errands, matching materials, taking out parcels, cleaning the workrooms, and often also helping in the work of the house. To be at the beck and call of all employed in a busy workshop was arduous and fatiguing. They could work legally from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. and often were sent out from the workshop a few minutes before 8 p.m. to take a dress to a customer living some distance away, which resulted in their not reaching home until a late hour. It was not surprising that the young persons in those workshops often looked weary and overdone; but there were plenty of girls to take their place, so they would not give in.

Shelterless, naked, and hungry, He is exposed to the bleak winds, the cold rains, and hot sun of heaven, with none that love him, none that care for him. His employer hates him because he asks high wages or joins strikes; his fellow laborer hates him because he competes with him for employment…. Let him fare at least as well as the dog, and the horse, and the sheep. Better to be down with the kids and the goats, than stand naked and hungry without. As a slave, he will be beloved and protected. Whilst free, he will be hated, despised, and persecuted. Such is the will of God and order of Providence. It is idle to inquire the reasons.

Industrial homework is a dead end, perpetuating the misery and poverty of those it traps. It creates a subclass of workers who receive none of the benefits for which America's working people have fought, sometimes at the cost of their lives.

The greatest evil that fortune can bring to men is to endow them with feeble resources and yet to make them ambitious.

I have seen the Indian in his forests and the negro in his chains, and thought as I contemplated their pitiable condition, that I saw the very extreme of human wretchedness, but I did not then know the condition of unfortunate Ireland …. In all countries, more or less, paupers may be discovered but an entire nation of paupers is what never was seen till it was shown in Ireland. The misery of Ireland descends to degrees unknown elsewhere.

The miserable living conditions, the long [work] hours, the universal insecurity, tended to tear down the personality, cheapen the man.