Top 77 Quotes & Sayings by Joe Hill

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American activist Joe Hill.
Last updated on April 15, 2025.
Joe Hill

Joe Hill, born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund and also known as Joseph Hillström, was a Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World. A native Swedish speaker, he learned English during the early 1900s, while working various jobs from New York to San Francisco. Hill, an immigrant worker frequently facing unemployment and underemployment, became a popular songwriter and cartoonist for the union. His most famous songs include "The Preacher and the Slave", "The Tramp", "There Is Power in a Union", "The Rebel Girl", and "Casey Jones—the Union Scab", which express the harsh and combative life of itinerant workers, and call for workers to organize their efforts to improve working conditions.

I will die like a true-blue rebel. Don't waste any time in mourning - organize.
If the workers took a notion they could stop all speeding trains; every ship upon the ocean they can tie with mighty chains.
Work and pray, live on hay, you'll get pie in the sky when you die. — © Joe Hill
Work and pray, live on hay, you'll get pie in the sky when you die.
She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.
Don't mourn, Organise
Longhaired preachers come out every night, Tryin' to tell us what's wrong and what's right. But when asked about something to eat, They will tell you in voices so sweet. You will eat (You will eat!) By and by, (By and by!) In that glorious land in the sky. (Way up high!) Work and pray, live on hay, You'll get pie in the sky when you die. (That's a lie!)
I remind myself that no one day of writing matters all that much. A story is built somewhat like a stalactite - one little drip of mud and grit at a time.
But God fears women even more that He fears the devil- and is right to. She, with her power to bring life into the world, was truly made in the image of the Creator, not man.
All the world is made of music. We are all strings on a lyre. We resonate. We sing together.
That was one thing you found out when you were stoned, or wasted, or feverish: that the world was always turning and that only a healthy mind could block out the sickening whirl of it.
I hope if there is another world, we will not be judged too harshly for the things we did wrong here—that we will at least be forgiven for the mistakes we made out of love.
I remember an era when you could get your nose sliced off for sticking it too far into another man's business. Now you can find out anything about anyone with the click of a button. There is no privacy and no consideration, and everyone is prying into things that aren't their affair. You can probably check on the intertube and find out what color underwear I have on today.
The blood of a redheaded woman is three degrees cooler than the blood of a normal woman. This has been established by medical studies.
And he paddled away in his douche canoe.
Don't believe everything you hear today — © Joe Hill
Don't believe everything you hear today
She'd thought love had something to do with happiness, but it turned out they were not even vaguely related. Love was closer to a need, no different from the need to eat, to breathe.
She just knew that even when you had nothing, you still had love.
You loved me as hard as you knew how. I'd give anything to go back and love you better.
There's only room for one hero in this story-and everyone knows the devil doesn't get to be the good guy.
The mad sometimes drilled holes in their own heads to let the demons out. To relieve the pressure of thoughts they could no longer bear. Jude understood the impulse. Each beat of his heart was a fresh and staggering blow felt in the nerves behind his eyes and in his temples. Punishing evidence of life.
The soul is an irrational, indivisible equation that perfectly expresses one thing: you. The soul would be no good to the devil if it could be destroyed. And it is not lost when placed in Satan's care, as is so often said. He always know exactly how to put his finger on it.
Were talking about an attitude. Delayed gratification is there, planning, be able to give up something now to get something later.
Was there any human urge more pitiful-or more intense- than wanting another chance at something?
You can't let facts get in the way of the truth.
The soul may not be destroyed. The soul goes on forever. Like the number pi, it is without cessation or conclusion. Like pi it is a constant. Pi is an irrational number, incapable of being made into a fraction, impossible to divide from itself. So, too, the soul is an irrational, indivisible equation that perfectly expresses one thing: you.
A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over. And I maintain that if a person can put a few common sense facts into a song and dress them up in a cloak of humor, he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers who are too unintelligent or too indifferent to read.
What a blessed if painful thing, this business of being alive.
The best way to get even with anyone is to put them in the rearview mirror on your way to something better.
We'll have freedom, love and health/When the grand red flag is flying, In the Workers' Commonwealth.
Terror is the desire to save your own ass, but horror is rooted in sympathy.
Taking a thing apart is always faster than putting something together. This is true of everything except marriage.
Pick a sin we can both live with, is what I ask.
I want you to remember what was good in me, not what was most awful. The people you love should be allowed to keep their worst to themselves.
It was something... the way a person's life picked up speed, the way a life was like a bullet aimed at one final target, impossible to slow or turn aside, and like the bullet, you were ignorant of what you were going to hit, would never know anything except the rush and the impact.
Fantasy was always only a reality waiting to be switched on.
I will be waiting by candlelight in our tree house of the mind.
Love requires Context.
I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman's power to choose who and how to love, to redefine love as she sees fit, not as God thinks it ought to be. The author is unworthy of His own characters.
Aren't you going to tell me I'm not so bad? she asked. Mmm-no. I was thinking how every man loves a hot girl with a history of making mistakes. Because it's always possible she'll make one with you.
Some things you didn't give away, no matter how much you owed. — © Joe Hill
Some things you didn't give away, no matter how much you owed.
He understood that the ghost existed first and foremost within his own head. That maybe ghosts always haunted minds, not places. If he wanted to take a shot at it, he’d have to turn the barrel against his own temple.
Men, she thought, were one of the world's few sure comforts, like a fire on a cold October night, like cocoa, like broken-in-slippers. Their clumsy affections, their bristly faces, and their willingness to do what needed to be done - cook an omelette, change lightbulbs, make with hugging - sometimes almost made being a woman fun.
Sooner or later a black car came for everyone.
I mean, when the world comes for your children, with the knives out, it's your job to stand in the way.
I guess Satan was the first superhero [...] In his first adventure, he took the form of a snake to free two prisoners being held naked in a Third World jungle prison by an all-powerful megalomaniac. At the same time, he broadened their diet and introduced them to their own sexuality.
You think you know someone. But mostly you just know what you want to know.
He paused, twisting his goatee, considering the law in Deuteronomy that forbade clothes with mixed fibers. A problematic bit of Scripture. A matter that required thought. "Only the devil wants man to have a wide range of lightweight and comfortable styles to choose from," he murmured at last, trying out a new proverb. "Although there may be no forgiveness for polyester. On this one matter, Satan and the Lord are in agreement.
Work and pray, live on hay, youll get pie in the sky when you die.
I have nothing to say for myself, only that I have always tried to make this earth a little bit better
Music [is] the third rail of life. You grabbed it to shock yourself out of the dull drag of hours. To feel something. To burn with all the emotions you didn't get to experience in the ordinary run of school, TV, and loading the dishwasher after dinner.
Gold don't come off. What's good stays good no matter how much of a beating it takes. — © Joe Hill
Gold don't come off. What's good stays good no matter how much of a beating it takes.
Already, though, she understood the difference between being a child and being an adult. The difference is when someone says he can keep the bad things away, a child believes him.
Innocence ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, you know. Innocent little kids rip the wings off flies, because they don’t know any better. That’s innocence
You know someone for a while and then one day a hole opens underneath them, and they fall out of your world.
The difference between childhood and adulthood, Vic had come to believe, was the difference between imagination and resignation. You traded one for the other and lost your way.
Workers of the world awaken. Break your chains, demand your rights. All the wealth you make is taken, by exploiting parasites. Shall you kneel in deep submission from your cradle to your grave? Is the height of your ambition to be a good and willing slave?
Maybe all the schemes of the devil were nothing compared to what man could think up.
When you think about it, most of the good ideas came along to make sin a whole lot easier.
... people made the imaginary real all the time: taking the music they heard in their head and recording it, seeing a house in their imagination and building it. Fantasy was always only a reality waiting to be switched on.
Who knows what may lie around the next corner? There may be a window somewhere ahead. It may look out on a field of sunflowers.
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