[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 GOMPERSNo human being is unimportant. My inspiration comes in opening opportunities that all alike may be free to live life to the fullest.
More Samuel Gompers Quotes
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Show me the country that has no strikes and I’ll show you the country in which there is no liberty.
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So long as we have held fast to voluntary principles and have been actuated and inspired by the spirit of service.
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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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The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit.
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The periods of unemployment accompanying depression in the business cycle . . . present a challenge to all our claims to progress, humanity, and civilization.
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So long as there is one [person] who seeks employment and cannot find it, the hours of work are too long.
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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.
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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.
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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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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 lasting gain has ever come from compulsion.
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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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Where trade unions are most firmly organized, there are the rights of the people most respected.
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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.
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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