Child Labor Quotes

Some people call it child labor. I call it ... let's not get technical. ~ Sarah Ockler

For my whole life I have dedicated myself to those who have been subjected to injustice. I've conducted investigations and written in newspapers about the homeless, the incarcerated, the sick excluded from care, about child labor, child exploitation, etc. ~ Dacia Maraini

Today you have a situation where now the prescription is: People who don't have enough money to buy food should end up paying for their drinking water. That is going to be the kind of situation in which you will get more child labor. You will get more exploitation of women. You're going to get an absolutely exploitative economy as the very basis of living becomes a source of capital accumulation and corporate growth. In fact, the chief of Coca-Cola in India said: "Our biggest market in India comes from the fact that there is no drinking water left. People will have to buy Coca-Cola. ~ Vandana Shiva

The progress of civilization has meant the reduction of employment, not its increase. It is because we have become increasingly wealthy as a nation that we have been able virtually to eliminate child labor, to remove the necessity of work for many of the aged and to make it unnecessary for millions of women to take jobs. ~ Henry Hazlitt

He expected her to feel what she did not know how to feel. There were things that existed for him that she could not penetrate. With his close friends, she often felt vaguely lost. They were youngish and well-dressed and righteous, their sentences filled with "sort of," and "the ways in which"; they gathered at a bar every Thursday, and sometimes one of them had a dinner party, where Ifemelu mostly listened, saying little, looking at them in wonder: were they serious, these people who were so enraged about imported vegetables that ripened in trucks? They wanted to stop child labor in Africa. They would not buy clothes made by underpaid workers in Asia. They looked at the world with an impractical, luminous earnestness that moved her, but never convinced her. Surrounded by them, Blaine hummed with references unfamiliar to her, and he would seem far away, as though he belonged to them, and when he finally looked at her, his eyes warm and loving, she felt something like relief. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The conservative goal has been the Third Worldization of the United States: an increasingly underemployed, lower-wage work-force; a small but growing moneyed class that pays almost no taxes; the privatization or elimination of human services; the elimination of public education for low-income people; the easing of restrictions against child labor; the exporting of industries and jobs to low-wage, free-trade countries; the breaking of labor unions; and the elimination of occupational safety and environmental controls and regulations. ~ Michael Parenti

A serf-supporting and self-respecting democracy can plead no justification for the existence of child labor, no economic reason for chiseling workers' wages or stretching workers' hours. ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

First of all, nobody gave us anything. It makes me furious when I hear that they gave us suffrage. Excuse me? It took 72 years of unrelenting, unbroken organizing grassroots effort to get women's suffrage. It took 113 years to get rid of child labor by law. It took similarly long periods of organized effort to accomplish any advance in social policy. ~ Gerda Lerner

Charles Kernaghan is a legitimate American hero ... Through his determination he has forced the leadership in our country and many other countries around the world to pay attention. Kernaghan has done more to expose child labor than has the whole Department of Labor that has a budget of hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, because he has the guts and determination to do it. ~ Bernie Sanders

All the problems of the world - child labor, corruption - are symptoms of a spiritual disease: lack of compassion. ~ Bill Vaughan

Kids don't have a little brother working in the coal mine, they don't have a little sister coughing her lungs out in the looms of the big mill towns of the Northeast. Why? Because we organized; we broke the back of the sweatshops in this country; we have child labor laws. Those were not benevolent gifts from enlightened management. They were fought for, they were bled for, they were died for by working people, by people like us. Kids ought to know that. That's why I sing these songs. That's why I tell these stories, dammit. No root, no fruit! ~ Utah Phillips

Christian socialism"). This is a difficult concept for modern liberals to grasp because they are used to thinking of the progressives as the people who cleaned up the food supply, pushed through the eight hour workday, and ended child labor. But liberals often forget that the progressives were imperialists, at home and abroad. They were the authors of Prohibition, the Palmer Raids, eugenics, loyalty oaths, and, in its modern incarnation, what many call "state capitalism. ~ Jonah Goldberg

Amid attempts to protect elephants from ivory poachers and dolphins from tuna nets, the rights of children go remarkably unremarked. ~ Anna Quindlen

Child Labor laws, the minimum wage, workplace safety regulations, and other protections we now take for granted, came about when we chose to place the wellbeing of people above money.

There are losers and winners. There are losers because there are winners. 'Every condition exists,' Martin Luther King, Jr. once wrote, 'simply because someone profits by its existence. ~ Matthew Desmond

Newt Gingrich wants to repeal child labor laws. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the man that we need to lead us into the 18th century. ~ David Letterman

One finds fortunes built on slave labor, indentured labor, prison labor, immigrant labor, female labor, child labor, and scab labor - backed by the lethal force of gun thugs and militia. 'Old money' is often little more than dirty money laundered by several generations of possession. ~ Michael Parenti

Dude, you know I'm not getting paid for this shit, which is probably against the law. Child labor going on right here in the heartland of America!
-Dan Garrett ~ Leah Rae Miller

In the supposedly enlightened eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, parental indifference, child neglect, and raw cruelty appearedamong Europeans of all classes ... In mid-nineteenth- century France, families abandoned their children at the rate of thirty-three thousand a year ... It took sixty years after the criminalization of cruelty to animals for cruelty to children to be made punishable under English law ... Industrialized America added brutalizing child labor to the oppressions of the young. ~ Letty Cottin Pogrebin

The times today are too dangerous for the young and the smart to be not bothered. Know the truth. Remember, "We can deny the truth. But, we can't avoid it." We have been there; we have all been there. Ask a female friend who is fighting for a better pay scale, ask the father of an immigrant who is nervous about the future of his daughter, ask a gay friend who is fighting for the right to marry, ask an African-American friend who wants her younger brother to be unafraid and proud, ask a homeless worker in Bangladesh whose house just got swept by rising sea levels, ask a young child in Beijing who breathes an air polluted by fossil fuels, ask a child labor in India who works ten hours and twelve hours to get two square meals a day. And, when you ask, you will know. You will know why we need to take it personally. ~ Sharad Vivek Sagar

disorganized. The progress of civilization has meant the reduction of employment, not its increase. It is because we have become increasingly wealthy as a nation that we have been able virtually to eliminate child labor, to remove the necessity of work for many of the aged and to make it unnecessary for millions of women to take jobs. A much smaller proportion of the American population needs to work than that, say, of China or of Russia. The real question is not how many millions of jobs there will be in America ten years from now, but how much shall we produce, and what, in consequence, will be our standard of living? The problem of distribution, on which all the stress is being put today, is after all more easily solved the more there is to distribute. We ~ Henry Hazlitt

It was the evangelicals who led the fight against slavery, child labor, poor factory conditions, and the abuse of the poor and the insane. Much of what we value in modern social legislation, and perhaps take for granted, grew out of the ministry of Wesley and Whitefield and their successors. ~ Warren W. Wiersbe

Some girls cannot go to school because of the child labor and child trafficking. ~ Malala Yousafzai

We passed the Children's Bureau bill calculated to prevent children from being employed too early in factories. ~ William Howard Taft

Scratch any fortune and you'll find blood only a generation or two back ... child labor in mines or mills ... Slavery. Drugs. Stock swindles. Wasting nature with clear-cuts, pollution, harvesting to extinction. Monopolies. Disease. War. Every fortune comes out of something unpleasant. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Someone asked why do you want a homestead? To be independent, get out of the rat race, support local businesses, buy only American made. Stop buying stuff I don't need to impress people I don't like. Right now I am working in a big warehouse, for a major online supplier. The stuff is crap all made somewhere else in the world where they don't have child labor laws, where the workers labor fourteen- to sixteen-hour days without meals or bathroom breaks. There is one million square feet in this warehouse packed with stuff that won't last a month. It is all going to a landfill. This company has hundreds of warehouses. Our economy is built on the backs of slaves we keep in other countries, like China, India, Mexico, any third world country with a cheap labor force where we don't have to seem them but where we can enjoy the fruits of their labor. This American Corp. is probably the biggest slave owner in the world. ~ Jessica Bruder

These are the now-endangered markers of a civilized society: legally ordained minimum wages, child labor laws, workers safety and compensation laws, pure foods and safe drugs, Social Security, Medicare and rules that promote competitive markets over monopolies and cartels. ~ Bill Moyers

After all, despite the economic advantage to firms that employed child labor, it was in the social interest, as a national policy, to abolish it - removing that advantage for all firms. ~ Barry Commoner

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

Of course, we knew that this meant an attack on the union. The bosses intended gradually to get rid of us, employing in our place child labor and raw immigrant girls who would work for next to nothing. ~ Rose Schneiderman

Marketing jingles from every angle lure patrons to turn our backs on our locally owned stores, restaurants, and farms. And nobody considers that unpatriotic. This appears to aggravate Tod Murphy. We have the illusion of consumer freedom, but we've sacrificed our community life for the pleasure of purchasing lots of cheap stuff. Making and moving all that stuff can be so destructive: child labor in foreign lands, acid rain in the Northeast, depleted farmland, communities where the big economic engine is crystal meth. We often have the form of liberty, but not the substance. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Child labor, not a problem. Censorship, not a problem. Torture, not a problem. Chewing gum in China - oh, my God! You better not be over here chewing gum. ~ David Letterman

Child labor becomes a label of condemnation in spite of its ancient function as the quickest, most reliable way to human independence - ~ John Taylor Gatto

Sebastian: I have to say something to you. You don't have to respond. You don't have to tell me anything. All you need to do is listen while I clear something up.
When did we meet? At six? Seven?

Lena: Eight. We moved into this house when I was eight, and you were outside, in the backyard throwing a football with your dad.

Sebastian: Yeah, that's right. You were out on this balcony watching me.

Lena: You saw that?

Sebastian: I saw you. I also heard your dad telling you to get your butt back in the house and start unpacking. I think you responded by telling him unpacking boxes violated child labor laws. That's when I fell in love with you. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

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

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. ~ Grace Abbott

I am also very proud to be a liberal. Why is that so terrible these days? The liberals were liberatorsthey fought slavery, fought for women to have the right to vote, fought against Hitler, Stalin, fought to end segregation, fought to end apartheid. Liberals put an end to child labor and they gave us the five day work week! What's to be ashamed of? ~ Barbra Streisand

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. ~ Carol Bellamy

We must ensure that while eliminating child labor in the export industry, we are also eliminating their labour from the informal sector, which is more invisible to public scrutiny - and thus leaves the children more open to abuse and exploitation. ~ Carol Bellamy

In the early days of my child labor activities I was an investigator with a camera attachment ... but the emphasis became reversed until the camera stole the whole show. ~ Lewis Hine

In addition to its elements of adolescent titillation, the world of JA2 contains racism, sexism, xenophobia, government-sponsored torture, child labor, and extreme economic inequality. And yet it's difficult to say what the game's overall stance is on these issues. JA2 is highly pluralistic, allowing you to play all sorts of characters from all sorts of backgrounds. That pluralism leads to a kind of moral relativism. While you can have a squad of friendly heroes who help each other as well as the downtrodden people of Arulco, you can also play as a squad of psychotic good ol' boys who ignore issues of social justice, seeking only to get a paycheck for putting a bullet in the queen's head. ~ Anonymous

I hope things get better, but it's a difficult process,' Foudy said. 'You're dealing with governments that don't care about children working. And it's hard to put our Western ideals on their situations. If you don't pay people enough so they can survive with only the father or mother working, how can they expect the kids not to work? ~ Jere Longman

We are laying the foundation for some new, monstrous civilization. Only now do I realize what price was paid for building the ancient civilizations. The Egyptian pyramids, the temples and Greek statues - what a hideous crime they were! How much blood must have poured on to the Roman roads, the bulwarks, and the city walls. Antiquity - the tremendous concentration camp where the slave was branded on the forehead by his master, and crucified for trying to escape! Antiquity - the conspiracy of the free men against the slaves!
.... If the Germans win the war, what will the world know about us? They will erect huge buildings, highways, factories, soaring monuments. Our hands will be placed under every brick, and our backs will carry the steel rails and the slabs of concrete. They will kill off our families, our sick, our aged. They will murder our children.
And we shall be forgotten, drowned out by the voices of the poets, the jurists, the philosophers, the priests. They will produce their own beauty, virtue, and truth. They will produce religion. ~ Tadeusz Borowski

The national curriculum for the Swedish preschool is twenty pages long and goes on at length about things like fostering respect for one another, human rights, and democratic values, as well as a lifelong desire to learn. The document's word choices are a pretty good clue to what Swedish society wants and expects from toddlers and preschoolers. The curriculum features the word "play" thirteen times, "language" twelve times, "nature" six times, and "math" five times. But there is not a single mention of "literacy" or "writing." Instead, two of the most frequently used words are "learning" (with forty-eight appearances) and "development" (forty-seven).

The other Scandinavian countries have similar early childhood education traditions. In Finland, formal teaching of reading doesn't start until the child begins first grade, at age seven, and in the Finnish equivalent of kindergarten, which children enroll in the year they turn six, teachers will only teach reading if a child is showing an interest in it. Despite this lack of emphasis on early literacy, Finland is considered the most literate country in the world, with Norway coming in second, and Iceland, Denmark, and Sweden rounding out the top five, according to a 2016 study by Central Connecticut State University. John Miller, who conducted the study, noted that the five Nordic countries scored so well because "their monolithic culture values reading. ~ Linda Åkeson McGurk

Two days later after the visit to CHOP, Jill wrote, "Give me the faith to leave this with you. Please help her to talk." Then the journal goes silent. It would be ten years before Jill would have the faith and the energy to write another entry in her prayer journal. It would be twenty years before Kim would begin to speak, at age twenty-five. God left Jill in confusion in order to grow her faith, her ability to connect with him. To become like a child, Jill had to become weak again. ~ Paul E. Miller

Missis was, she dared say, glad enough to get rid of such a tiresome, ill-conditioned child, who always looked as if she were watching everybody, and scheming plots underhand. Abbot, I think, gave me credit for being a sort of infantine Guy Fawkes. ~ Charlotte Bronte

By four years of age, the average child in a family receiving public assistance has heard about 13 million words, compared to 45 million for a child from a wealthier family. The disadvantages developed during their first four years are usually still present in high school. ~ Sal Albanese

Can you speak to the dead…like your sister?"
Ms. Dupré's body seems to loosen, and her voice gets soft as a feather against your skin. "No, child. But you can say goodbye to someone even after he's gone. You just have to find a way that's right for you. ~ Thomas Fahy

In mythos and fairy tales, deities and other great spirits test the hearts of humans by showing up in various forms that disguise their divinity. They show up in robes, rags, silver sashes, or with muddy feet. They show up with skin dark as old wood, or in scales made of rose petal, as a frail child, as a lime-yellow old woman, as a man who cannot speak, or as an animal who can. The great powers are testing to see if humans have yet learned to recognize the greatness of soul in all its varying forms. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Africa, help me to go home, carry me like an aged child in your arms. Undress me and wash me. Strip me of all of these garments, strip me as a man strips off dreams when the dawn comes ... ~ Aime Cesaire

'Paradise Lost' was printed in an edition of no more than 1,500 copies and transformed the English language. Took a while. Wordsworth had new ideas about nature: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and we got a lot of national parks. Took a century. What poetry gives us is an archive, the fullest existent archive of what human beings have thought and felt by the kind of artists who loved language in a way that allowed them to labor over how you make a music of words to render experience exactly and fully. ~ Robert Hass

In Paris and later in Marseille, I was surrounded by some of the best food in the world, and I had an enthusiastic audience in my husband, so it seemed only logical that I should learn how to cook 'la cuisine bourgeoise' - good, traditional French home cooking. ~ Julia Child

At each stage of development the child needs different resources from the family. During the first year, a variety of experience and the availability of the parents for attachment are primary. During the second and third years, stimulation of language development is critical. During the years prior to school entrance, information that persuades children they are loved becomes critical, and during the school years it is important for children to believe that they can succeed at the tasks they want to master. ~ Jerome Kagan

The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I was a chronically shy child. That kernel of my younger self is still there, but I've developed mechanisms to deal with it. ~ Richard Eyre

Every childhood has its talismans, the sacred objects that look innocuous enough to the outside world, but that trigger an onslaught of vivid memories when the grown child confronts them. ~ Steven Johnson

Every mother can easily imagine losing a child. Motherhood is always half loss anyway. The three-year-old is lost at five, the five-year-old at nine. We consort with ghosts, even as we sit and eat with, scold and kiss, their current corporeal forms. We speak to people who have vanished and, when they answer us, they do the same. Naturally, the information in these speeches is garbled in the translation. ~ Karen Joy Fowler

An undergraduate researching the "witch hunt" cases asked for evidence that there had been more than one hundred cases, noting that the major lists of such cases added up to about fifty. There was no reply that provided documentation to support the claim.[34] The members of the list were generally strong proponents of the witch-hunt narrative. They knew the answer to the question "Is there a child sex abuse witch hunt?" These "witch hunters," as those on this list soon came to describe themselves, were increasingly activists who used the internet to exchange information and ideas. Jonathan Harris may have done more than anyone else to disseminate the witch-hunt narrative in the mid 1990s and beyond.[35] ~ Ross Cheit

My greatest fault is that I am no longer a child ~ Janusz Korczak

Never ever doubt in magic. The purest honest thoughts come from children, ask any child if they believe in magic and they will tell you the truth. ~ Scott Dixon

To the night version of her (mother) I owe free-floating anxiety. I am no longer a child in an unsafe home, but anxiety became habit. My brain is conditioned. I worry. I recheck everything obsessively. Is the seat belt fastened, are the reservations correct, is my passport in my purse? Have I done something wrong? Have I said something wrong? I'm sorry - whatever happened must be my fault. Is everyone all right, and if they aren't, how can I step in? That brilliant serenity prayer: God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. To all the children of alcoholics I want to say, Good luck with that. If I don't do it myself, it won't get done (this belief is often rewarded in this increasingly incompetent world). Also, I panic easily. I am not the person you want sitting in the exit row of an airplane. And distrust. Just in general, distrust. Irony.
Irony, according to the dictionary, is the use of comedy to distance oneself from emotion. I developed it as a child lickety-split. Irony was armor, a way to stick it to Mom. You think you can get me? Come on, shoot me, aim that arrow straight at my heart. It can't make a dent because I'm wearing irony. ~ Delia Ephron

I thought I was going to die. I was a teenager. It was the hardest thing I'd ever gone through. It'd be contradictory if I said I wasn't pro-choice. I wasn't ready. I didn't have anything to offer a child. ~ Nicki Minaj

The Burden of Work You are submerged by a flood of troubles that the size of your household places on your shoulders. You must, then, call upon our Lord all the more and beg for his holy help, so that the work you must do will be agreeable to him and so that you will embrace it for his honor and glory. Our days are few (cf. Job 14:1), and consequently our labor cannot be overlong. By means of a little patience, we will get through it with honor and contentment, for we have no greater consolation at the end of the day than to have worked hard and shouldered its pains. ~ Francis De Sales

Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him? ~ Sigmund Freud

Here is what the end of the world looks like:
It looks like a child running out into the road, eyes focused only on some destination ahead - the future, which is on the other side - and the child fails to notice the speeding truck that is there, on that same road, in the present.
This is what the end of the world looks like.
All roads cross here. ~ Andrew Smith

: Their acts violated our trust. : The secrecy told us we were alone. : The shame swirling through our experience convinced us we didn't deserve the best for ourselves. : Our circumstances twisted our beliefs about what to expect out of life. : Surviving our unpredictable, disempowering childhood left little opportunity to explore our talents or creativity. It's been said, living through childhood sexual abuse is like living in a war zone. Each of us survived by doing the best we could. Now we have the opportunity to celebrate the child we were and all we did to reach this place in life when healing is possible. Now we get to update our information. And this will bring encouraging, empowering, joy-filled changes into our lives. Each time you go back into a memory, you have the opportunity to 'see' what you learned in that moment of trauma. When I was six-years old, playing with my doll with abandon that blocked out all other noise, I found ~ Jeanne McElvaney

You might have grown up barefoot and motherless, but you overcame," he whispered. "The person God made you to be stood up under adversity. Maybe he knew you needed to have that stress to realize your full potential. You wouldn't be the same person if you'd grown up in a different environment." His other hand went to her belly. "Makes the responsibility for raising our child so important. He's put our baby with us for a specific reason. We have to do our part, then trust him with the rest." Though ~ Colleen Coble

But what are you? Buddhist? Japanese? Communist? What?' 'I'm nothing.' 'Can you be nothing?' I never knew how to answer that question when I was asked it as a child, because the wording troubled me. Can you be nothing? I will be nothing. ~ Jaume Cabre

As a child in Atuan, Tenar had learned how to learn. There seemed always to be a great deal to be learned, more than she would have believed when she was a prentice-priestess or the pupil of a mage. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Ghazal !يا لطيف (Ya Lateef!)
- 1942-

A lot more malaise and a little more grief every day,
aware that all seasons, the stormy, the sunlit, are brief every day.

I don't know the name of the hundredth drowned child, just the names
of the oligarchs trampling the green, eating beef every day,

while luminous creatures flick, stymied, above and around
the plastic detritus that's piling up over the reef every day.

A tiny white cup of black coffee in afternoon shade,
while an oud or a sax plays brings breath and relief every day.

Another beginning, no useful conclusion in sight‚ -
another first draft that I tear out and add to the sheaf every day.

One name, three-in-one, ninety-nine, or a matrix of tales
that are one story only, well-springs of belief every day.

But I wake before dawn to read news that arrived overnight
on a minuscule screen , and exclaim يا لطيف every day. ~ Marilyn Hacker

I do not long for the world as it was when I was a child. I do not long for the person I was in that world. I do not want to be the person I am now in that world then. None of the forms nostalgia can take fits. I found childhood boring. I was glad it was over. ~ Alan Bennett

There's a different flavor to children's literature you read after you grow up than there was reading it as a child. Things that were sweet as a child become bitter once you grow up. ~ Mizuki Nomura

I was given a stethoscope in a child's 'doctor's bag' at about age six and I loved it! One could hear the heart beating through that plastic toy. ~ Jessye Norman

However much of time, labor, or other means it takes to establish a reputation, it frequently happens that it requires nearly as much to maintain it. One who has written a good book, is expected on all occasions to "talk like a book." Or, if one has achieved an act of heroism, he is expected to perform acts of heroism for the edification of all who approach him. There are people who can never believe they see a lion unless they hear him roar. ~ Christian Nestell Bovee

We must clearly understand that when we give the child freedom and independence, we are giving freedom to a worker already braced for action, who cannot live without working and being active. ~ Maria Montessori