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

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.

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.

The periods of unemployment accompanying depression in the business cycle . . . present a challenge to all our claims to progress, humanity, and civilization.

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.

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.

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.

Bondage is of the mind; freedom too is of the mind. If you say ‘I am a free soul. I am a son of God who can bind me’ free you shall be.

Religion, like water, may be free, but when they pipe it to you, you’ve got to help pay for the piping. And the piper.

A society can never be free without women’s liberation

Only the man who lives in the laws of GOD is free

Everyone hasn’t got the power to free oneself and go away to another place or country… No one is capable of freeing oneself from society.

I love Prospect Park-watching fireflies at night and going to the bandshell for free music.

The day we run out of petrol is the day Iran will be free.

That’s the biggest problem existing in this country! People are always mixing up the word free and freedom. Free is something you get for nothin.’ Freedom is a responsibility.