Let social busybodies and professional “public morals experts” in their fads reflect upon the perils they rashly invite under this pretense of social welfare.
SAMUEL GOMPERSTo 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.
More Samuel Gompers Quotes
-
-
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 -
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
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
Labor Day is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race or nation.
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 -
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.
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
Time is the most valuable thing on earth: time to think, time to act, time to extend our fraternal relations, time to become better men, time to become better women, time to become better and more independent citizens.
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 -
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 GOMPERS -
There is not a right too long denied to which we do not aspire in order to achieve; there is not a wrong too long endured that we are not determined to abolish.
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 -
So long as there is one [person] who seeks employment and cannot find it, the hours of work are too long.
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
Where trade unions are most firmly organized, there are the rights of the people most respected.
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
Workingmen are at the foundation of society.
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 -
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 GOMPERS -
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.
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit.
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
Our movement is of the working people, for the working people, by the working people. . . .
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
No lasting gain has ever come from compulsion.
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
The labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce.
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
Show me the country that has no strikes and I’ll show you the country in which there is no liberty.
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
No race of barbarians ever existed yet offered up children for money
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
To free him from the tyrannies, petty or otherwise, which served to make his existence a slavery.
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 -
The periods of unemployment accompanying depression in the business cycle . . . present a challenge to all our claims to progress, humanity, and civilization.
SAMUEL GOMPERS