Samuel Gompers Quotes

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

We do want more, and when it becomes more, we shall still want more. And we shall never cease to demand more until we have received the results of our labor.

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

Great minds like a think
-The Economist-

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

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.

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

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.

You can't do it unless you organize.

[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 ...

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

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

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.

Workingmen are at the foundation of society. 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.

No lasting gain has ever come from compulsion.

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

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, to make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful, and childhood more happy and bright.