Samuel Gompers Quotes

35 quotes in 599 categories

• What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less…
• Our movement is of the working people, for the working people, by the working people. . . . There is not a right too long…
• It is impossible for capitalists and laborers to have common interests.
• Doing for people what they can and ought to do for themselves is a dangerous experiment.
• The freedom of speech and the freedom of the press have not been granted to the people in order that they may say things which…
• Why should the wealth of the country be stored in banks and elevators while the idle workman wanders homeless about the streets and the idle…
• Show me the country that has no strikes and I'll show you the country in which there is no liberty.
• There may be here and there a worker who for certain reasons unexplainable to us does not join a union of labor. That is his…
• Workingmen are at the foundation of society. Show me that product of human endeavor in the making of which the workingman has had no share,…
• All other holidays are in a more or less degree connected with conflicts and battles of man's prowess over man, of strife and discord for…
• Do I believe in arbitration? I do. But not in arbitration between the lion and the lamb, in which the lamb is in the morning…
• No race of barbarians ever existed yet offered up children for money
• One fact stands out in bold relief in the history of man's attempts for betterment. That is that when compulsion is used, only resentment is…
• Our mission has been the protection of the wage-worker, now; to increase his wages; to cut hours off the long workday, which was killing him;…
• You can't weigh the soul of a man with a bar of pig-iron.
• No lasting gain has ever come from compulsion.
• You can't do it unless you organize.
• So long as there is one [person] who seeks employment and cannot find it, the hours of work are too long.
• W.Z. Foster {head of the American Communist Party}, who had no money, went to Moscow and came back and announced that he was building a…
• There are such wonderful possibilities in the life of each man and woman! No human being is unimportant. My inspiration comes in opening opportunities that…

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