Samuel Gompers Quotes

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.

Where trade unions are most firmly organized, there are the rights of the people most respected.

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.

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.

The labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce.

Show me the country that has no strikes and I'll show you the country in which there is no liberty.

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.

Doing for people what they can and ought to do for themselves is a dangerous experiment.

You can't weigh the soul of a man with a bar of pig-iron.

The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit.

You can't do it unless you organize.

No lasting gain has ever come from compulsion.

So long as there is one [person] who seeks employment and cannot find it, the hours of work are too long.

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

No race of barbarians ever existed yet offered up children for money

Labor Day is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race or nation.

[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.

The working people know no country. They are citizens of the world.

No race of barbarians ever existed yet offered up children for money.

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.