“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.”

You can’t do it unless you organize.

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.

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.

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.

No lasting gain has ever come from compulsion.

To make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful, and childhood more happy and bright.

To free him from the tyrannies, petty or otherwise, which served to make his existence a slavery.

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.

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

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.

Where trade unions are most firmly organized, there are the rights of the people most respected.

Workingmen are at the foundation of society.

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.

No race of barbarians ever existed yet offered up children for money

Show me the country that has no strikes and I’ll show you the country in which there is no liberty.

Labor Day is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race or nation.

The economic basis of this contest was the power to tax, to float bonds, to award franchise: in short, to gain control over the financial resources of the newly organized States.

We have never in human history seen a run-up in credit of the kind we have just witnessed in advanced economies since 1970.

The basic aggregate measure of gearing or leverage is telling us that today’s advanced economies’ operating systems are more heavily dependent on private sector credit than anything we have ever seen before.

Then our economic future will be very different from our recent past.

Macroeconomic stability will be more elusive and that will affect all of our lives: from the risks many will face in childhood.

Furthermore, this pattern is seen across all the advanced economies, and isn’t just a feature of some special subset (e.g. the Anglo-Saxons).

If we are to remain preeminent in transforming knowledge into economic value, America’s system of higher education must remain the world’s leader in generating scientific and technological breakthrough, and in meeting the challenge to educate workers.

These days, even out of office, I still read economic reports.