“No lasting gain has ever come from compulsion.”

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.

No human being is unimportant. My inspiration comes in opening opportunities that all alike may be free to live life to the fullest.

All other holidays are in a more or less degree connected with conflicts and battles of man’s prowess over man, of strife and discord for greed and power, of glories achieved by one nation over another. Labor Dayis devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race, or nation.

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

It is impossible for capitalists and laborers to have common interests.

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.

So long as we have held fast to voluntary principles and have been actuated and inspired by the spirit of service.

[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.

In seasons of tumult and discord bad men have most power; mental and moral excellence require peace and quietness.

By punishing men of talent we confirm their authority.

It is a part of the nature of man to resist compulsion.

Even for learned men, love of fame is the last thing to be given up.

The denial of an objective moral law, based on the compulsion to deny the existence of God, results ultimately in the denial of evil itself.

When we experience the power of the Self, there is an absence of fear, there is no compulsion to control, and no struggle for approval or external power.

It’s a compulsive need to wreck everything. You might notice there’s a pattern of stripping down and building back up again throughout my life. But I guess that’s how some of us conduct our lives.

We will always find fundamentally the compulsion to become what the soul should be.