Labor Activists

"We will not meet the problems of tomorrow by talking about yesterday's concepts."

"I happen to believe that this is the crux of where we're going in terms of the future of the American economy. I think that the basic problem is to find a way to work out the competing equities among the three groups—the worker, the stockholder, and the consumer—so that we share the abundance in a way that would create the dynamics of growth and expansion."

"I think one of the things we need to do is to avoid the tragic waste of human potential."

"Wall Street says I am an agent of Moscow, and Moscow says I am an agent of Wall Street."

"Therefore, as we see it, the cold war is not an attempt to change each other's systems of government, but to influence those that are uncommitted."

"The only war America wants to fight is war against poverty, hunger, ignorance, and disease. It's the only war mankind can win."

"One thing we must do, most of all, in the future, is to harness the atom for peace and get all of the miners out of the earth."

"Together we shall build a world of peace, freedom, security, social justice, and brotherhood."

"This is our goal—a world of peace, freedom, and social justice for all people everywhere."

"For centuries man has struggled to divide up economic scarcity. There was too little food for the hungry, too little clothing for the naked. Now for the first time in the history of mankind, we have within our grasp the economic tools of unprecedented abundance which can end man's ageless struggle against want and misery. The same scientific and technical know-how which brought forth the H-bomb and guided missiles gives to the world automation and the tools of economic abundance. Will mankind have the vision and common sense to use the new tools of abundance to usher in an era of human progress and human fulfillment?"

"We must negotiate from unity and strength and stay firm on matters of principle and flexible on matters of procedure."

"Freedom, like peace, can be made secure only as it is made universal."

"The real test of friendship and solidarity is not where one stands when the weather is fair and the sun is shining but rather where one stands at a time of storm and stress."

"No man and no people live as an island unto themselves."

"Freedom is an indivisible value and when the freedom of one is threatened the freedom of all is in jeopardy."

"The task is difficult. The struggle will be hard, but let us always remember that human progress has never been served to mankind on a silver platter. The history of the world shows chapter after chapter that men of faith and courage have had to fight to bring to fulfillment their dreams and their hopes and their aspirations. What we need to do is keep the faith. Keep the faith in ourselves. And when the going is rough, as it will be, let us remember the the test of one's convictions is not how did you behave, how did you stand up, when it was convenient and comfortable. The test of one's convictions is: Do you stand up for the things you believe when it takes courage? Do you stand up in the face of adversity, in the face of great controversy? This is the kind of fight we are engaged in. That's why when the going is rough, always remember that there are millions of us, and that together we can move mountains, and that together we can solve this problem and make America in the image of what it really stands for. So I say to you, we pledge our hands and our hearts, we pledge our all to you in this struggle, because we believe that this is the most important struggle that America must win, if it is going to be true to itself and provide leadership to the free world. And if we mobilize our multitudes, if we mobilize all the people of good will and good faith in America, I say that we can do the job, and together we can build that brave new tomorrow that we dream about and fashion it in the image of peace, freedom and justice, and human brotherhood."

"We want an America in which every child has educational opportunity, an America in which every citizen has equal job opportunity, equal rights to the use of all public facilities, the right to live in a decent neighborhood, in a decent home."

"Well, there are some mighty fine people in America who tell you, "yes," they are against discrimination in every phase. They are opposed to it in terms of job opportunities. They are opposed to it in terms of education. They are opposed to it in terms of transportation. But, they say, "legislation is not the way to do it; you've got to get hatred out of men's hearts." Well, we agree. Education is important. But you can't educate this problem out of existence by education alone. You've got to work both on the educational front and the legislative front. And you've got to parallel those two activities right down the line."

"Well, I want to say to these people in Congress that they have been on the longest sit-down strike in the history of America—eight long years. And we think it's about time that they terminate that sit-down strike on civil rights and begin to turn out some legislation."

"The Supreme Court is living in the twentieth century and the Congress is still somewhere back in the dark nineteenth century. It's about time they catch up."

"But in truth, America is the last, best hope of freedom. If we can't make freedom and democracy work in America, then it can't be made to work any place in the world."

"Just sit down on a doorstep with a peasant in a village of Northern India and take on the task of trying to explain to him why America, conceived in freedom and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, a nation that can split the atom, that can make a pursuit ship go three times as fast as sound and yet, in this twentieth century, we can't live together in brotherhood and we continue to discriminate against Negroes. It will tax your ingenuity, and you will give them no answers. You can only give them excuses. And excuses are not good enough, if we are going to win the struggle of freedom in the world."

"I have been saying for a long time that the crisis in the world is not economic or political or military. Essentially, the crisis in the world is a moral crisis. It's a reflection of man's growing immorality to himself, of man's growing inhumanity to man. The H-bomb is the highest and most terrible destructive expression of that growing inhumanity. And in a sense our crisis in America—the crisis in education, the crisis in civil rights—is not political, it is moral. But we haven't demonstrated the moral courage to step up to solving these problems, and this is our basic problem. America is in crisis, not because it lacks the economic resources, not because it lacks the political know-how, not because we don't know how to do the job of squaring democracy's practices with its noble promises. We just haven't demonstrated the moral courage. And until we do, we will not meet this basic crisis in civil rights and in education."

"I've often thought: Why is it that you can get a great nation like America marching, fighting, sacrificing, and dying in the struggle to destroy the master race theory in Berlin, and people haven't got an ounce of courage to fight against the master race theory in America? We need the same sense of dedication, the same courage, and the same determination to fight the immorality of segregation and racial bigotry in America as we did in the battlefields against Hitlersim."

"When the employer can divide you and pit white against black, American-born against foreign-born, he can divide and rule and exploit everyone."

"I'm proud to belong to the NAACP, because it is made up of people who are dedicated in a great crusade to make America true to itself. This is what this is about. Make America live up to its highest hopes and aspirations and translate those hopes and aspirations into practical, tangible reality in the lives of all people, whether they are white or black, whether they live in the North or the South. I say that each of us is blessed that we can be engaged in this crusade, in this struggle for justice, for human dignity, in this struggle to wipe out in every phase of our national life every ugly immoral kind of discrimination."

"These are the sober facts. This is where we are. We stand there in that delicate, precarious balance on the rim of hell, and on the other side is this brave new world that lies ready to be realized. This is one of the great tragedies of the world—and you history teachers perhaps know it better than I—that we find chapter after chapter of the history books filled with the stories of man's inhumanity to man and of the great wars. In those great wars of the world's history, many nations achieved their highest expression of collective action—they worked, they marched, they sacrificed, and they died because they were driven forward by the negative motivations of war and because of their common fears and common hatreds. I believe that the great challenge of the leadership of the world is to find a way to tap the great spiritual reservoir, the great spiritual power that lies deep within the human breast, and find a way to get people working, marching, building, and sacrificing because of positive peacetime motivations and because they have common hopes, common aspirations, and common faith."

"I've read in the papers, as you do, about juvenile delinquency. I've always had a feeling that the problem in America is not juvenile delinquency, but adult delinquency. Our children are not failing us—it is we who are failing our children."

"I'm proud of the role the American labor movement has played historically in fighting to make education possible for everyone's child. We share the belief that every child is made in the image of God and that every child ought to have the right to an educational opportunity that will enable that child to grow intellectually and spiritually and culturally—not limited by antiquated classrooms, overcrowded classes, or underpaid teachers—but limited only by the capacity which God gave that child to grow."

"I ask this simple question. I ask it of you and I ask it of my fellow Americans everywhere. Why is it that we have the courage to mobilize the power of America to meet the challenge of war, but we fail to have the same courage to mobilize America to meet the challenge of peace?"

"Why do we have these machines? Is economic effort an end, or is it a means to an end? Obviously it must be a means to an end. And the end must be the enrichment of human life, and the expansion of frontiers for human growth, not for just the few, but for the many."

"The crisis in the world is not economic, military, or political; essentially, it is a moral crisis. It is a reflection of man's growing inhumanity to man, which finds its most horrible expression in the total destruction now made possible by the H-bomb. I believe our problem is a reflection of the fact that there is a growing and most serious moral and cultural gap between the progress we have made as a people in the physical sciences, and our lack of progress in the human and social sciences. We know much better how to work with the machines than we know how to live with people."

"You cannot save democracy in a vacuum of idealism. You have got to be motivated by idealism, but you have got to also be fighting the hard problem of practical politics."

"If the peoples of great nations can work, sacrifice, fight, and die together because they share common fears and common hatreds in war, why can we not find a way to tap the great spiritual reservoir that lies deep within each of us and get people and nations working, sacrificing, and building together in peacetime because they share common hopes and common aspirations."

"The great challenge before us is to find a way to get people and nations working together in the positive and rewarding task of peace as they have repeatedly joined together in the senseless and destructive waging of war."

"Just as the moral and spiritual power of Gandhi won in Indian, so American Negroes shall win in America, and they shall take their place as free and equal citizens in the family of American democracy."

"We must learn to judge people, not by their color or race or creed, but rather by their worth as human beings."

"The struggle against racial intolerance and racial discrimination and bigotry must be waged everywhere in the world wherever such immoral and ugly practices exist."

"I have been saying for a long time that I believe the more young Americans who are trained to join with other young people in the world to be sent abroad with slide rule, textbook, and medical kit to help people help themselves with the tools of peace, the fewer young people will need to be sent with guns and weapons of war."

"Only in an atmosphere of freedom can the creative genius of the human spirit find full expression."

"Democratic nations must seek and find unity in diversity, while Communists achieve unity through conformity."

"We believe that it is not enough to fight against the things that we oppose—we must fight with equal courage and equal dedication for the things that we believe in."

"Free labor understands and acts in the knowledge the the struggle for peace and the struggle for human freedom are inseparably tied together with the struggle for social justice."

"The great challenge before us is to find a way to use the bright promise of science and technology in a massive retaliation against poverty, hunger, and social injustice in the world."

"In the struggle for the hearts and minds of millions of yet uncommitted people in the economically underdeveloped portions of the world, the more young Americans we send to help as technical missionaries—with slide rule, with textbook, and with medical kit—to work in the pursuit of peace, the fewer we might need to send with guns and flame-throwers to resist Communist aggression on the battlefields."

"There is no greater calling than to serve your brother. There is no greater contribution than to help the weak. There is no greater satisfaction than to have done it well."

"Let us never forget that he who would serve God must prove that he is worthy by serving man."

"All the learned men with all their wisdom, with all of the legal niceties they can put together on the finest of parchment, cannot produce one ton of steel."

"Free management must realize that in a free society there is no substitute for the voluntary discharge of social responsibility."

"You cannot make peace and freedom secure in the world as long as hundreds of millions of people are denied the necessities of life, so long as millions and millions of people are committed to belong to the have-not nations, and they and their children are denied the right to achieve economic and social justice."