Lucy Parsons, a Biography and Selected quotations by Lucy Parsons

 Lucy Parsons

Lucy Parsons History

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Lucy Parsons, a Biography by Rolling Thunder

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Lucy Parsons: The Most Dangerous Woman in America?

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Selected Quotes of Lucy Parsons

Now, what do we mean when we say revolutionary Socialist? We mean that the land shall belong to the landless, the tools to the toiler, and the products to the producers

Give them to understand that you will not stand patiently by and see your hard earnings squandered by a luxuriating class of idlers.

The selfish scheme called “property rights” has superseded human rights and created four times more useless work than is required to produce and distribute all the comforts and luxuries of life.

How many of the wage class, as a class, are there who can avoid obeying the commands of the master (employing) class, as a class? Not many, are there?

Then are you not slaves to the money power as much as were the black slaves to the Southern slaveholders? Then we ask you again: What are you going to do about it? You had the ballot then. Could you have voted away black slavery? You know you could not because the slaveholders would not hear of such a thing for the same reason you can’t vote yourselves out of wage-slavery.

Let the masses understand that these robbers hold this property (which is so much unpaid labor) under the plea of the laws which they themselves [the robbers] have made, and by the sanction of the very men they have locked out to starve.

Who, pray, are benefiting by all this waste and confusion? The few, a mere small percentage of the population of the world. All the remainder submit, because they think “it always has been so and it must always be so.” The work of those who have a conception of a true society of the future, must devote all their efforts toward disabusing the people’s minds of the ancient falsehoods. It can be done. Many other hoary lies have passed away, so will this one, too.

It was during the great railroad strike of 1877 that i became interested in what is known as the 'Labor question

it is labor, and labor only, which makes civilization possible. ’Tis labor that toils, and spins, and weaves, and builds, that another, not it, may enjoy. ’Tis the laborers who dive into the unknown caverns of the sea and compel her to yield up her hidden treasures, which they know not even the value thereof.

When will the people see the real cause of all their woe—the private ownership of the means of life?

When will the masses learn that property is theirs and theirs only who has produced it—earned it.