Show me that product of human endeavor in the making of which the workingman has had no share, and I will show you something that society can well dispense with.
SAMUEL GOMPERSThe worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit.
More Samuel Gompers Quotes
-
-
The periods of unemployment accompanying depression in the business cycle . . . present a challenge to all our claims to progress, humanity, and civilization.
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
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 right. It is his legal right, no matter how morally wrong he may be. It is his legal right, and no one can or dare question his exercise of that legal right.
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
We will stand by our friends and administer a stinging rebuke to men or parties who are either indifferent, negligent, or hostile, and, wherever opportunity affords, to secure the election of intelligent, honest, earnest trade unionists, with clear, unblemished, paid-up union cards in their possession.
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
[The labor movement is] a movement of the working people, for the working people, by the working people, governed by ourselves, with its policies determined by ourselves.
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
Doing for people what they can and ought to do for themselves is a dangerous experiment.
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
To free him from the tyrannies, petty or otherwise, which served to make his existence a slavery.
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
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 please, and which are based upon accepted thought, but the right to say the things which displease.
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
To be free, the workers must have choice. To have choice they must retain in their own hands the right to determine under what conditions they will work.
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
So long as we have held fast to voluntary principles and have been actuated and inspired by the spirit of service.
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
Workingmen are at the foundation of society.
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
In the last analysis, the welfare of the workers depends upon their own initiative. Whatever is done under the guise of philanthropy or social morality which in any way lessens initiative is the greatest crime that can be committed against the toilers.
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
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 great secret machine to undermine the American labor movement and turn it over to the Red International, owned by Lenin.
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
You can’t do it unless you organize.
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
The right to say the things which convey the new and yet unexpected thoughts, the right to say things, even though they do a wrong.
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 was killing him; to improve the safety and the sanitary conditions of the workshop.
SAMUEL GOMPERS