War & Peace Quote by Mary Harris Jones

A line like this doesn’t politely announce a set of beliefs; it plants a flag. “I abide” is old-fashioned on purpose: it sounds like scripture and settlement at once, suggesting permanence rather than preference. Jones isn’t saying she visits causes. She lives where the conflict is, treating injustice as a kind of weather system you can track and inhabit.

The genius is in the phrase “a fight against wrong.” She avoids policy detail and legal language, because her target isn’t a single law or boss but the moral architecture that props them up. “Wrong” is blunt, almost childlike, and that’s the point: it denies elites the comfort of complexity. When exploitation gets dressed up as economics or “labor relations,” Jones strips it back to a verdict anyone can understand.

Context makes the statement sharper. As “Mother Jones,” she became a roaming organizer in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, moving through coal towns, strikes, blacklists, and violence. To “abide” there is to accept the risks that came with siding openly with workers in an era when companies hired armed guards and courts treated organizing as a menace. It also signals solidarity as practice, not branding: she’s not hovering above the struggle as a reformer; she’s embedded in it.

The subtext is a dare. If wrong is active and organized, then decency can’t be passive and private. You either take up residence in the fight, or you’ve already chosen a side.