Frances Perkins Quotes

The day I need an armed bodyguard is the day I admit my job's too much for a woman.

Like many young people, I was an ardent admirer of Theodore Roosevelt... Out of the period that I was in school a whole generation, particularly women emerged, but men too, who had a great passion for social justice...

The process of recovery is not a simple one. ... We cannot be satisfied merely with makeshift arrangements which will tide us over the present emergencies. We must devise plans that will not merely alleviate the ills of today, but will prevent, as far as it is humanly possible to do so, their recurrence in the future.

His arrogance isn't what disturbs me so much as his self-centeredness... He doesn't seem to care about anything that doesn't concern him personally.

Gentlemen... let me make a plain statement. As I see it, the Labor Commission is duty-bound always to consider two things about every recommendation. One: what will this provide in the way of health, comfort, decency and security? Two: what will it cost?

1911... was the year of the great Triangle Fire in New York City, a terrible industrial accident which burned out the contents of a 9th and 10th floor loft building factory... It caught on fire and the blaze spread very rapidly. There was only one means of exit available, the other two means of exits were the elevator which was ablaze almost immediately as the flames got into this open shaft and spread from floor to floor and the second exit was locked. It was an exit to the roof... it would have saved most of the people in that building if it had not been locked.
It had been locked by the employer himself because he feared... he would be robbed either by his employees or by the outsider.

To know him is to love him... He's honest, high-minded, intelligent and—above all—independent. I have worked with him in government for years. There has never been any conflict between his official duties and his religious beliefs, I am confident there never will be!

So we proceeded and it proved to be a most educative experience. This factory investigating commission was continued... for four years and its report, is... seven volumes. ...and it's in great detail ...the recommendations, the testimony. We went all over the state. I was a young person then and certainly not fit for service on any super commission but I was the chief—I was the investigator, and in charge of the investigations and this was an extraordinary opportunity... to get into factories to make a report and be sure it was going to be heard.

I think any compulsion other than moral compulsion is wrong. Let disputes be settled by public opinion, not statute.

We were in a terrible situation... Banks were closing. The economic life of the country was almost at a standstill.

Like many people, I was an ardent admirer of Theodore Roosevelt. ...He had recommended to the people 's book How the Other Half Lives. I had read it, and Theodore Roosevelt's inaugural address of 1905, and had straightaway felt that the pursuit of social justice would be my vocation.

[I]t afterwards, seems in some way to have paid the debt society owed to those children, those young people who lost their lives in the Triangle Fire. It's their contribution to the people of New York that we have this really magnificent series of legislative acts to protect and improve the administration of the law regarding the protection of work people in the City of - in the State of New York.

What is the trouble? How can we cure this? ...What can be done? ...I had to do something about unnecessary hazards to life, unnecessary poverty. It was sort of up to me. This feeling... sprang out of a period of great philosophical confusion which overtakes all young people...

I thought witch-hunting was a thing of the past, but that's what this 'red-baiting' immigration squad is doing. They see communists behind every foreign name.

I'm the last leaf on the New Deal tree, and I think perhaps I've clung here too long already.