You can’t do it unless you organize.
SAMUEL GOMPERSYou can’t do it unless you organize.
SAMUEL GOMPERSThe periods of unemployment accompanying depression in the business cycle . . . present a challenge to all our claims to progress, humanity, and civilization.
SAMUEL GOMPERSDo 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 GOMPERSNo human being is unimportant. My inspiration comes in opening opportunities that all alike may be free to live life to the fullest.
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.
SAMUEL GOMPERSWhat 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 GOMPERSDoing for people what they can and ought to do for themselves is a dangerous experiment.
SAMUEL GOMPERSThe working people know no country. They are citizens of the world.
SAMUEL GOMPERSOne 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.
SAMUEL GOMPERSOur 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 GOMPERSOur movement is of the working people, for the working people, by the working people. . . .
SAMUEL GOMPERSThere 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 GOMPERSLabor Day is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race or nation.
SAMUEL GOMPERSNo race of barbarians ever existed yet offered up children for money
SAMUEL GOMPERSWhere trade unions are most firmly organized, there are the rights of the people most respected.
SAMUEL GOMPERSThere are such wonderful possibilities in the life of each man and woman!
SAMUEL GOMPERS