So long as we have held fast to voluntary principles and have been actuated and inspired by the spirit of service.
SAMUEL GOMPERSYou can’t do it unless you organize.
More Samuel Gompers Quotes
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Doing for people what they can and ought to do for themselves is a dangerous experiment.
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
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.
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
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.
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You can’t weigh the soul of a man with a bar of pig-iron.
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
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 -
The periods of unemployment accompanying depression in the business cycle . . . present a challenge to all our claims to progress, humanity, and civilization.
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
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
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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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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.
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
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.
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
So long as there is one [person] who seeks employment and cannot find it, the hours of work are too long.
SAMUEL GOMPERS -
In the last analysis, the welfare of the workers depends upon their own initiative. Whatever is done under the guise of philanthropy or social morality which in any way lessens initiative is the greatest crime that can be committed against the toilers.
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The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit.
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There are such wonderful possibilities in the life of each man and woman!
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Labor Day is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race or nation.
SAMUEL GOMPERS






