Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Quotes

His (Peter Kropotkin's) appeal to the youth of the poor struck home to me personally, as if he were speaking to us there in our shabby poverty-stricken Bronx flat: "Must you drag on the same weary existence as your father and mother for thirty or forty years? Must you toil your life long to procure for others all the pleasures of well-being, of knowledge, of art, and keep for yourself only the eternal anxiety as to whether you can get a bit of bread?"

if there is really one thing that I am proud of in my long labor history, it is that while he was in prison, before he was executed, Joe Hill wrote a song for me dedicated to me, that was called, the "Rebel Girl" and that song, I hope you will do it here some time, it may not be the best of words or the best of music, but it came from the heart and it was certainly so treasured.

the hatred against the IWW was so great -that editorials in papers would say, "They should be arrested at dawn and shot before breakfast, without a trial."

The Industrial Workers of the World is a new form of labor organization, one that stands for the industrial working class and that class alone.

The suffrage movement was growing more militant and figures like Maude Malone appeared. She organized the Harlem Equal Rights League in 1905. She interrupted Theodore Roosevelt at a meeting of 3,000 people to demand where he stood on woman suffrage. She walked up and down Broadway, at the same time we were holding our street meetings there, with signs front and back, like a sandwich man, demanding "Votes for Women," and lost her post as a librarian in consequence.

Shall it be 'America First' or 'Workers of the World, Unite!'"

Today the working class have only conditions that they themselves are in a position to remedy, they have only false conditions, not nature’s making, but man’s making, that they themselves can overthrow

I despise the rule of Rockefeller and Morgan as much as that of King or Kaiser, and am as outraged by Ludlow and Calumet as by Belgium.

May Day was baptized in the blood of American workers.

Suffragist speakers on streetcorners were invariably told: "Go home and wash your dishes," or, regardless of their age: "Who's taking care of your children?" Others said: "Imagine a pregnant woman running for office," or "How could women serve on juries and be locked up with men jurors?"

in the period of World War I a tremendous onslaught was made against the IWW, the Socialists, all Progressives in our country. There was a very strong peace movement at that time. It was not like World War II, which was an anti-Fascist war.

Our work was to educate and stimulate. Education is not a conversion, it is a process. One speech to a body of workers does not overcome their prejudices of a lifetime. We had prejudices on the national issues, prejudices between crafts, prejudices between competing men and women, all these to overcome.

We have only our organization, fellow workers; they have capital; they have the power of the government, the slugging community of the capitalist class; they have the power of the state; they have the power of international capital — and we have but our power of organization.

the IWW's positive side, certainly it was militant, it was courageous, that it fitted the period, that it belonged to the pioneer days and that it fought for the interests of the poorest, the most lonely, the most despised, those that the AFL couldn't organize, the foreign born, the women, and as the Negroes began coming into industry, the Negroes.

The AFL was the skilled workers' organization and its form and methods and principles were not the same as the IWW. The IWW believed in the class struggle. They didn't believe in the brotherhood of capital and labour and they believed that these unorganized foreign-born mass production workers should be organized in an industrial union - all together in one union and not split up into a dozen or more organizations.