“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.”

It is impossible for capitalists and laborers to have common interests.

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.

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

[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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Let social busybodies and professional “public morals experts” in their fads reflect upon the perils they rashly invite under this pretense of social welfare.

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 aroused, and the end is not gained. Only through moral suasion and appeal to man’s reason can a movement succeed.

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

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

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

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

Our movement is of the working people, for the working people, by the working people. . . .

I have been the only female minister in every government department I’ve worked in.

It’s always been my formula to get the next picture set up before anyone’s seen the last one.

Why it’s been left to me to smooth things over, I don’t know. Dennis Rodman, of all people.

The trouble with me is that for a long time I have just been an I person.

I asked a girl who came from America to England, when I was only English, and she admitted she had been to a drama school. And I said, “What did they teach you?” And she said, “They taught me to be a candle burning in an empty room.”

Assists is what Earvin is all about. That’s what my whole life has been, assisting others.

It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others.

I’ve stopped wanting a home, I think, because I’ve been on tour all my life, basically.