Samuel Gompers

What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more…

— Samuel Gompers

There is not a right too long denied to which we do not aspire in order to achieve; there is not a…

— Samuel Gompers

Our mission has been the protection of the wage-worker, now; to increase his wages; to cut hours off the long workday, which…

— Samuel Gompers

There may be here and there a worker who for certain reasons unexplainable to us does not join a union of labor.…

— Samuel Gompers

Time is the most valuable thing on earth: time to think, time to act, time to extend our fraternal relations, time to…

— Samuel Gompers

No lasting gain has ever come from compulsion.

— Samuel Gompers

To be free, the workers must have choice. To have choice they must retain in their own hands the right to determine…

— Samuel Gompers

“Great minds like a think -The Economist-”

— Samuel Gompers

So long as we have held fast to voluntary principles and have been actuated and inspired by the spirit of service, we…

— Samuel Gompers

All other holidays are in a more or less degree connected with conflicts and battles of man's prowess over man, of strife…

— Samuel Gompers

Our movement is of the working people, for the working people, by the working people. . . . There is not a…

— Samuel Gompers

The periods of unemployment accompanying depression in the business cycle . . . present a challenge to all our claims to progress, humanity, and civilization.

— Samuel Gompers

What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more…

— Samuel Gompers

One fact stands out in bold relief in the history of man's attempts for betterment. That is that when compulsion is used,…

— Samuel Gompers

The labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce.

— Samuel Gompers

Where trade unions are most firmly organized, there are the rights of the people most respected.

— Samuel Gompers

Doing for people what they can and ought to do for themselves is a dangerous experiment.

— Samuel Gompers

The man who has his millions will want everything he can lay his hands on and then raise his voice against the…

— Samuel Gompers

So long as there is one [person] who seeks employment and cannot find it, the hours of work are too long.

— Samuel Gompers

The working people know no country. They are citizens of the world.

— Samuel Gompers

Workingmen are at the foundation of society. Show me that product of human endeavor in the making of which the workingman has…

— Samuel Gompers

The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit.

— Samuel Gompers

You can't weigh the soul of a man with a bar of pig-iron.

— Samuel Gompers

No race of barbarians ever existed yet offered up children for money

— Samuel Gompers

Do I believe in arbitration? I do. But not in arbitration between the lion and the lamb, in which the lamb is…

— Samuel Gompers