Gompers Quotes

#1. Samuel Gompers has spent his life trying to keep labor from working too hard and has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

Will Rogers

#2. The labor leader Samuel Gompers had long considered the production of cigars in unsanitary tenements "one of the most dreadful, cancerous sores" on the city of New York. Realizing

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#3. Advice to young Samuel Gompers that might apply in many other areas: Learn from socialism, but don't join it.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#4. You can't do it unless you organize.

Samuel Gompers

#5. Let's turn inflation over to the post office. That'll slow it down.

Mo Udall

#6. 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.

Samuel Gompers

#7. Time is the most valuable thing on earth: time to think, time to act, time to extend our fraternal relations, time to become better men, time to become better women, time to become better and more independent citizens.

Samuel Gompers

#8. I thought I was looking for something. Now I get that I was looking for someone. You. I'll go back to school and get my degree because it will make you happy. But also because it will make me the kind of man you want. This all about you, Aurelia. Don't you get that?

Susan Mallery

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

Samuel Gompers

#10. 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.

Samuel Gompers

#11. One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.

Paul Valery

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

Samuel Gompers

#13. One fact stands out in bold relief in the history of man's attempts for betterment. That is that when compulsion is used, only resentment is aroused, and the end is not gained. Only through moral suasion and appeal to man's reason can a movement succeed.

Samuel Gompers

#14. Great minds like a think
-The Economist-

Samuel Gompers

#15. 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.

Samuel Gompers

#16. Work up imagination to the state of vision.

William Blake

#17. 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.

Samuel Gompers

#18. It's much easier to tame a wild tiger with your bare hands than to convince someone who believes in something, no matter wrong or right.

Oliver Blade

#19. 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.

Samuel Gompers

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

Samuel Gompers

#21. There are such wonderful possibilities in the life of each man and woman! No human being is unimportant. My inspiration comes in opening opportunities that all alike may be free to live life to the fullest.

Samuel Gompers

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

Samuel Gompers

#23. No lasting gain has ever come from compulsion.

Samuel Gompers

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

Samuel Gompers

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

Samuel Gompers

#26. 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.

Samuel Gompers

#27. 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.

Samuel Gompers

#28. [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

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

Samuel Gompers

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

Samuel Gompers

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

Samuel Gompers

#32. 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.

Samuel Gompers