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[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.
More Samuel Gompers Quotes
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The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit.
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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.
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No race of barbarians ever existed yet offered up children for money
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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.
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Workingmen are at the foundation of society.
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[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.
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Let social busybodies and professional “public morals experts” in their fads reflect upon the perils they rashly invite under this pretense of social welfare.
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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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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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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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You can’t do it unless you organize.
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Doing for people what they can and ought to do for themselves is a dangerous experiment.
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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.
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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.
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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
SAMUEL GOMPERS