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 greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures.
SAMUEL GOMPERSYou can’t weigh the soul of a man with a bar of pig-iron.
More Samuel Gompers Quotes
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To make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful, and childhood more happy and bright.
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The man who has his millions will want everything he can lay his hands on and then raise his voice against the poor devil who wants ten cents more a day.
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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 found inside the lion
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Our movement is of the working people, for the working people, by the working people. . . .
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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.
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Workingmen are at the foundation of society.
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To free him from the tyrannies, petty or otherwise, which served to make his existence a slavery.
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So long as we have held fast to voluntary principles and have been actuated and inspired by the spirit of service.
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The periods of unemployment accompanying depression in the business cycle . . . present a challenge to all our claims to progress, humanity, and civilization.
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The trade union movement represents the organized economic power of the workers… It is in reality the most potent and the most direct social insurance the workers can establish.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Where trade unions are most firmly organized, there are the rights of the people most respected.
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Show me the country that has no strikes and I’ll show you the country in which there is no liberty.
SAMUEL GOMPERS