Labor Movement Quotes

The wage-earning class the world over are the victims of society. ~ Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

A labor victory must be economic and it must be revolutionizing. ~ Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

There is nothing stronger than the American labor movement. United, we cannot and we will not be turned aside. We'll work for it, sisters and brothers. We'll stand for it. Together. Each of us. To bring out the best in America. To bring out the best in ourselves, and each other. ~ Richard Trumka

To me, the labor movement was never just a way of getting higher wages. What appealed to me was the spiritual side of a great cause that created fellowship. You wanted the girl or the man who worked beside you to be treated just as well as you were, and an injury to one was the concern of all. ~ Rose Schneiderman

The labor movement is organized upon a principle that the strong shall help the weak. ~ John L. Lewis

If we don't have workers organized into labor unions, we're in great peril of losing our democracy. ~ Dolores Huerta

I would say the issue for the labor movement in the United States is not structural ... there is no correlation between the success of workers and how the labor movement is structured. ~ Andy Stern

Well, we see an increasingly weaker labor movement as a result of the overall assault on the labor movement and as a result of the globalization of capital. ~ Angela Davis

It is, in short, the growing conviction that the Negroes cannot win - a conviction with much grounding in experience - which accounts for the new popularity of black power. So far as the ghetto Negro is concerned, this conviction expresses itself in hostility, first toward the people closest to him who have held out the most promise and failed to deliver (Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, etc.), then toward those who have proclaimed themselves his friends (the liberals and the labor movement), and finally toward the only oppressors he can see (the local storekeeper and the policeman on the corner). On the leadership level, the conviction that the Negroes cannot win takes other forms, principally the adoption of what I have called a "no-win" policy. Why bother with programs when their enactment results only in sham? Why concern ourselves with the image of the movement when nothing significant has been gained for all the sacrifices made by SNCC and CORE? Why compromise with reluctant white allies when nothing of consequence can be achieved anyway? Why indeed have anything to do with whites at all?

On this last point, it is extremely important for white liberals to understand what, one gathers from their references to "racism in reverse," the President and the Vice-President of the United States do not: that there is all the difference in the world between saying, "If you don't want me, I don't want you" (which is what some proponents of black power have in effect bee ~ Bayard Rustin

When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose? ~ Don Marquis

In England, there are only two things to be, basically: You are either for the labor movement or for the capitalist movement. Either you become a right-wing Archie Bunker if you are in the class I am in, or you become an instinctive socialist, which I was. ~ John Lennon

The history of the labor movement needs to be taught in every school in this land. America is a living testimonial to what free men and women, organized in free democratic trade unions can do to make a better life. We ought to be proud of it! ~ Hubert H. Humphrey

There is nothing more American than peaceful protest. ~ Russ Feingold

Before the war there were many who were more or less ignorant of the international labor movement but who nevertheless turned to it for salvation when the threat of war arose. They hoped that the workers would never permit a war. ~ Hjalmar Branting

They's making it worse, the labor movement got the mafia curse. ~ Frank Zappa

The labor movement is people. Our unions have brought millions of men and women together, made them members one of another, and given them common tools for common goals. Their goals are goals for all America - and their enemies are the enemies for progress. The two cannot be separated. ~ John F. Kennedy

But, if you think that by hanging us, you can stamp out the labor movement - the movement from which the downtrodden millions, the millions who toil and live in want and misery - the wage slaves - expect salvation - if this is your opinion, then hang us! Here you will tread upon a spark, but there, and there, and behind you and in front of you, and everywhere, flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out. ~ August Spies

With all of the talk about polling and demographics, I think too many people have lost touch with the human and moral crisis of deportations. Every day, roughly 1,000 people are deported because the Republican leadership of the House of Representatives is denying the majority of the US Congress a chance to vote on citizenship. I will be arrested today because the labor movement stands with the families tragically ripped apart by John Boehner and the House Republicans' embrace of a broken immigration system. ~ Arlene Holt Baker

Now, if we look at the way in which the labor movement itself has evolved over the last couple of decades, we see increasing numbers of black people who are in the leadership of the labor movement and this is true today. ~ Angela Davis

The labor movement means just this: it is the last noble protest of the American people against the power of incorporated wealth. ~ Wendell Phillips

The origin of the labor movement lies in self-defense ... ~ Mary Ritter Beard

The great social justice changes in our country have happened when people came together, organized, and took direct action. It is this right that sustains and nurtures our democracy today. The civil rights movement, the labor movement, the women's movement, and the equality movement for our LGBT brothers and sisters are all manifestations of these rights. ~ Dolores Huerta

All the time our union was progressing very nicely. There were lectures to make us understand what trades unionism is and our real position in the labor movement. ~ Rose Schneiderman

I think we will see a united labor movement again. When workers unite they're stronger. The same goes for unions. ~ John Sweeney

No one knows anything about a strike until he has seen it break down into its component parts of human beings. ~ Mary Heaton Vorse

The trade agreement has become a rather distinct feature of the American labor movement ... It is based on the idea that labor shall accept the capitalist system of production and make terms of peace with it. ~ Mary Ritter Beard

[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 ... ~ Samuel Gompers

The labor movement is our brother's keeper! The labor movement is our sister's keeper! ~ Thomas Perez

Today I send this message to every emerging global corporation: "justice; family, community, and union" are the same in every language and, wherever you go and whatever you do, a new global labor movement is coming to find you. ~ Andy Stern

The organized labor movement as it is constituted today is as much a concomitant of a capitalist economy as is capital. Organized labor is predicated upon the basic premise of collective bargaining between employers and employees. This premise can obtain only for an employer-employee type of society. If the labor movement is to maintain its own identity and security, it must of necessity protect that kind of society. ~ Saul Alinsky

I had never before seen my friends come in beaten, their heads laid open, their noses broken, or seen them jailed for peaceably demonstrating that they wanted work. I had only known how workers lived. Now I was face to face with what our society did to workers who could get no work. ~ Mary Heaton Vorse

The labor movement must be destroyed. ~ Karl Rove

Increased interest and participation by labor in the affairs of government should make for economic and political stability in the future. Labor has a constitutional and statutory right to participate. ~ John L. Lewis

I have been very interested in labor movement. If I could have wished another life, I would have loved to be a pioneer woman in the beginning of labor movement. ~ Astrid Lindgren

What created democracy was Thomas Paine and Shays' Rebellion, the suffragists and the abolitionists and on down through the populists and the labor movement, including the Wobblies. Tough, in your face people ... Mother Jones, Woody Guthrie ... Martin Luther King and Caesar Chavez. And now it's down to us. ~ Jim Hightower

The strike of the miners in Arizona was one of the most remarkable strikes in the history of the American labor movement. Its peaceful character, its successful outcome, were due to that most remarkable character, Governor Hunt. ~ Mary Harris Jones

The farm labor movement saw him as a racist. He seemed to delight in the most outrageous snubs. Farm labor organizer Cesar Chavez was in the governor's outer office, waiting to plead against a bill outlawing unions on Arizona farms, as Governor Williams was inside his office signing the bill. That action launched a recall effort against Williams in the mid-seventies - a drive that apparently collected the required signatures but was subverted when the Republican attorney general found a nitpicking technicality that disqualified most of the petitions. This was the man who held the fate of Winnie Ruth Judd in his hands. ~ Jana Bommersbach

Global warming is not a threat. But environmentalism's response to it is ... Even if global warming is a fact, the free citizens of an industrial civilization will have no great difficulty in coping with it-that is, of course, if their ability to use energy and to produce is not crippled by the environmental movement and by government controls otherwise inspired. ~ George Reisman

Abraham I cannot understand; in a way all I can learn from him is to be amazed. If one imagines one can be moved to faith by considering the outcome of this story, one deceives oneself, and is out to cheat God of faith's first movement, one is out to suck the life-wisdom out of the paradox. One or another may succeed, for our age does not stop with faith, with its miracle of turning water into wine; it goes further, it turns wine into water. ~ Johannes De Silentio

One of the primary questions in a state-church arrangement is, 'which controls which?' ... In Norway, for example, the liberal labor government has regularly angered Church officials by making controversial ministerial appointments against the wishes of the clergy ... These and other actions have strained the church-state relationship almost to the breaking point. As a result, some of the bishops have advocated disestablishment. ~ Dan Barker

[William] Coxe expresses ... both the pedestrian's advantage of complete freedom of movement, and the inspiring effect of the combination of continual change of scene with maximum time for appreciation that characterises the mobile gaze of the pedestrian traveller. If not a peripatetic by profession, Coxe is clearly one by choice. ~ Robin Jarvis

The poor, stupid, free American citizen! Free to starve, free to tramp the highways of this great country, he enjoys universal suffrage, and by that right, he has forged chains around his limbs. The reward that he receives is stringent labor laws prohibiting the right of boycott, of picketing, of everything, except the right to be robbed of the fruits of his labor. ~ Emma Goldman

It's just that I have this funny objection to torturing small animals no matter how scrumptious their body parts might be ... Our food industries are equal opportunity abusers: cows, chickens, pigs, and a special mention to those little calves who for their short, miserable lives are locked into crates too small to allow movement just so we can eat veal. ~ Ron Reagan

On the basis of his work each person is fully entitled to consider himself a part owner of the great workbench at which he is working with everyone else. A way toward that goal could be found by associating labor with the ownership of capital joint ownership of the means of work, sharing by the workers in the management and/or profits of businesses, so-called shareholding by labor, etc. ~ Pope John Paul II

I think hip hop is dead. It's all pop now. If you call it hip hop, then you need to stop. Hip hop was a movement. Hip hop was a culture. Hip hop was a way of life. It's all commercial now. ~ Tracy Morgan

Movement at the door of the cabin, and a small figure that I recognized as Amy Higgins appeared. The tall woman pulled off her hat and waved it, her long red hair streaming out like a banner in the wind. "Hello, the house!" she called, laughing. Then I was flying down the hill, with Jamie just before me, arms flung wide, the two of us flying together on that same wind. ~ Diana Gabaldon

What you know can never be the beyond. Whatever you experience is not the beyond. If there is any beyond, this movement of 'you' is absent. The absence of this movement probably is the beyond, but the beyond can never be experienced by you; it is when the 'you' is not there. Why are you trying to experience a thing that cannot be experienced? ~ U.G. Krishnamurti

We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community. ~ Henry Louis Gates

To Hegel, history was like a running river. Every tiny movement in the water at a given spot in the river is determined by the falls and eddies in the water higher upstream. But these movements are determined, too, by the rocks and bends in the river at the point where you are observing it.
the history of thought
or of reason
is like this river. The thoughts that are washed along with the current of past tradition, as well as the material conditions prevailing at the time, help to determine how you think. You can therefore never claim that any particular thought is correct for ever and ever. But the thought can be correct from where you stand ~ Jostein Gaarder

Modern art did not just happen. It came as a result of a deep reversal of spiritual values in the Age of Reason, a movement that in the course of a little more than two centuries changed the world. ~ Hans Rookmaaker

Training is principally an act of faith. The athlete must believe in its efficacy; he must believe that through training he will become fitter and stronger; that by constant repetition of the same movements he will become more skilful and his muscles more relaxed ... He must be a fanatic for hard work and enthusiastic enough to enjoy it. ~ Franz Stampfl

It is deeply interesting to notice also where the citizens were put to work. Each was set to labor on the bit of all opposite his home ... I do not say that men are not called to service in far distant places ... But I do say that for the vast majority the task that God appoints is the task lying at the door. The nearest thing is God's thing. The nearest duty is God's duty. He who cannot find his service there is little likely to be useful anywhere. ~ George H Morrison

Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery. ~ Stephen Dunn

New Zealand's been pretty quiet on human rights issues, which we will be taking rather more interest in, and in international labor issues. ~ Helen Clark

Every man is dishonest who lives upon the labor of others, no matter if he occupies a throne. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

We have a tendency to sugar coat the Civil Rights movement by showing arm in arm and everyone singing 'Kumbaya'. We don't really always show the resistance from the government, the resistance from the status quo, from the majority to silence the movement. ~ Nate Parker

The laws should be rigidly enforced which prohibit the immigration of a servile class to compete with American labor, with no intention of acquiring citizenship, and bringing with them and retaining habits and customs repugnant to our civilization. ~ Grover Cleveland

I have no idea who coined the term 'the New Journalism,' or when it was coined. I have never even liked the term. Any movement, group, party, program, philosophy or theory that goes under a name with 'new' in it is just begging for trouble, of course. ~ Tom Wolfe

What is the bedrock on which all of our diverse trans populations can build solidarity? The commitment to be the best fighters against each other's oppression. As our activist network grows into marches and rallies of hundreds of thousands, we will hammer out language that demonstrates the sum total of our movement as well as its component communities.

Unity depends on respect for diversity, no matter what tools of language are ultimately used. This is a very early stage for trans peoples with such diverse histories and blends of cultures to form community. Perhaps we don't have to strive to be one community. In reality, there isn't one women's, or lesbian, gay, bi community. What is realistic is the goal to build a coalition between our many strong communities in order to form a movement capable of defending all our lives. ~ Leslie Feinberg

It was Plato, according to Sosigenes, who set this as a problem for those concerned with these things, through what suppositions of uniform and ordered movements the appearances concerning the movements of the wandering heavenly bodies could be preserved. ~ Plato

The emancipation of women is practically the greatest egoistic movement of the nineteenth century, and the most intense affirmation of the right of the self that history has yet seen. ~ Ellen Key

Please do not say magic like you are discussing a bowel movement ... Humanity expects the lights, so they are provided. ~ Thomm Quackenbush

In my stillness I am the eternal possibility. In my movement I am the cosmos. ~ Deepak Chopra

The gospel Jesus spreads in the book of Luke has as one of its main themes that Jesus brings a social revolution, in which the previous systems and hierarchies of clean and unclean, sinner and saved, and up and down don't mean what they used to. God is doing a new work through Jesus, calling all people to human solidarity. Everybody is a brother, a sister. Equals, children of the God who shows no favouritism.

To reject this new social order was to reject Jesus, the very movement of God in flesh and blood. ~ Rob Bell

He lifted her hand to his mouth. The touch of his lips was soft on her scraped palm, the tiny licks of his tongue so light she could barely feel them. Wait. He was licking her?
"You can't lick me," she said sternly. "i don't know your name."
He looked up and a quick grin slashed across his face. "Luca," he said....
"Luca," she repeated. "Is that an America name?"
"No." He lifted her hand to his mouth again, and his tongue once more began a slow, gentle movement over the scrape. She was okay with it now, because she knew his name. ~ Linda Howard

When psychical phenomena have been as much investigated as physical, love will also receive its cumatology - that is, its science of waves. We shall follow the curves of the emotions through the ages, their movement of rise and fall, the oppositions and side-influences by which they have been determined. ~ Ellen Key

might almost be over. That's when it happens. There's a rumbling sound that is low at first but begins to build in volume. The tunnel trembles slightly. All the fighting stops immediately; people get to their feet, look around. Mark's doing the same, trying to find the source of the noise. He's still holding Trina's hand. "What is that?" she shouts. Mark shakes his head, keeps sweeping his gaze around the tunnel. The floor vibrates below his feet and the rumbling sound gets louder, becomes an outright roar. His eyes fall upon the stairs that lead up from the subtrans concourse just as the screams erupt - countless, countless screams and the blur of panicked movement in the crowd. A monstrous wall of filthy water is pouring down the wide steps. ~ James Dashner

He was a beautiful man. What more than this need be said? The sort of man who makes you think the movement of foliage might be causing the breeze. ~ Joseph O'Connor

The funeral pyre technique was abandoned when it became apparent how great was the toll. There was not enough labor to do it nicely, so a man with a flame-thrower was sent down instead, and he cremated them where they lay. Burned alive, suffocated, crushed - men, women, and children indiscriminately killed. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

In an honest service there is thin commons, low wages, and hard labor; in this, plenty and satiety, pleasure and ease, liberty and power; and who would not balance creditor on this side, when all the hazard that is run for it, at worst, is only a sour look or two at choking. No, a merry life and a short one, shall be my motto. ~ Bartholomew Roberts

Rappers are usually rapping about knowledge they think people need to get by in the world. If there's no movement that gives the idea that the knowledge people need is how to take over the system, what they see is that people need to know how to hustle; people need to know how to survive. ~ Boots Riley

Not every movement is progress; Some movements are just a way of burning fats! ~ Israelmore Ayivor

Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods. The liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement seeking to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy the promise, the hope, the vision. ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel