Child Labor Quotes

• 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

  Children, Labor Day, Together

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• If we can't begin to agree on fundamentals, such as the elimination of the most abusive forms of child labor, then we really are not ready to march forward into the future.

  Alexis Herman

  Children, Fundamentals, March

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

  Bill Vaughan

  Spiritual, Children, Compassion

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• Child labor perpetuates poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, population growth and other social problems.

  Kailash Satyarthi

  Children, Population Problem, Growth

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• Yes to trade, but trade that ensures that these other countries that trade with us aren't engaging in child labor.

  Barack Obama

  Country, Children, Trade

  "President Barack Obama Holds a News Conference". ye.usembassy.gov. November 14, 2016.

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• You can't regulate child labor. You can't regulate slavery. Some things are just wrong.

  Michael Moore

  Children, Slavery, Labor

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• A lot of work still remains but I will see the end of child labor in my lifetime.

  Kailash Satyarthi

  Children, Slave Labor, Slavery

  "Malala Yousafzai, Kailash Satyarthi win Nobel Peace Prize". www.foxnews.com. October 10, 2014.

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• 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

  Children, Self, Democracy

  Franklin D. Roosevelt's message to Congress on Establishing Minimum Wages and Maximum Hours, May 24, 1937.

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• 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

  Children, Abuse, Invisible

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

  Anna Quindlen

  Children, Rights, Elephants

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• 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

  Children, Independence, Labels

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• 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

  Children, Organization, Legislation

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• 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

  Children, Gum, Censorship

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• 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

  Children, Women, Feminist

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• 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

  Children, Attachment, Cameras

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• 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

  Children, Economic, Social

  Interview With Alan Hall, www.scientificamerican.com. June 23, 1997.

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• It's a collective truth that slavery is wrong, that child labor is wrong, that gross inequality is wrong. God didn't send it.

  Dar Williams

  Children, Slavery, Inequality

  Source: www.progressive.org

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• 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.

  Utah Phillips

  Country, Song, Brother

  Interview with David Kupfer, progressive.org. September 1, 2003.

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• 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

  Country, Jobs, Children

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

  William Howard Taft

  Children, Bills, Factories

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• 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

  Children, Dirty, Thug

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• 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

  Children, Men, Labor Laws

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• 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

  Children, Work, Animal

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• I think almost everything important that's ever happened was unimaginable shortly before it happened. Good things and bad things: ending slavery, ending child labor, women voting, etc.

  David Swanson

  Children, Thinking, Voting

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• 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

  Children, Drinking, People

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