Top 15 Frances Perkins Quotes

I was badly bitten by the idea that I could have a place in the theatre... I harbored that idea for a little while. It would have been a great pleasure, but I soon dropped it because I got principle...

And best (or worst) of all, I grew old during that time, so that now I am a settled and mature old spinster with an opinion on every topic under heaven... I've also acquired... a sense of humor—so that I no longer take myself and my doings seriously...

Social work was an infant then. ...I just lapped it up there... I discovered... that I had a mind that starts, operates on its own scheme, inquires, penetrates, goes to the bottom of things, puts two and two together and comes to some logical conclusions that have authority.

If facts were to be found, I was to devise ways to prevent it or overcome it either by social representation or by legislation at the municipal or state level. ...Ten cent lodging houses, employment agencies, the offices of the Philadelphia political "gangs," and the two police courts all became my haunts...

[I] wrote to anybody I knew who had any connection at all with charities to say I wanted a job, but had no experience.

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...

<nowiki>[</nowiki>'s speech] first opened my mind to the necessity for and the possibility of the work which became my vocation.

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...

I discovered for the first time, under the stimulus of that course and of that teacher, that I had a mind... My intellectual pride was aroused and the grim determination awakened me to get the most I could out of college.

One of the girls who was among my best friends came from a poverty-stricken home. Her family was delightful and I used to wonder how such things could happen...

I am extraordinarily the product of my grandmother... Scarcely a week goes by that I don't find myself saying, "As my grandmother used to say," and then repeating something that apparently has been a guiding principle all my life.

My generation was perhaps the first that openly and actively asserted—at least some of us did—the separateness of women and their personal independence in the family relationship...

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

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

Harry Bridges is a card-carrying Communist, Franklin, but that's the single black mark against him and isn't illegal. I just don't believe a man should be punished for what he believes or thinks.