Joseph J. Ettor Quotes

To permit ourselves to be provoked into violence would mean defeating ourselves; our real power is in our solidarity and our capacity to endure suffering rather than to give up the fight for the right to organize; no one can weave wool with machine guns; that cheerfulness was better for morale than bitterness and that therefore we would smile as we passed the machine guns and the police on the way from the hall to the picket lines around the mills.

You can’t mine coal with bayonets!

Men were shot dead for trying to hold on to their job.

It was the spirit of the workers that was dangerous. They are always marching and singing. The tired, gray crowds ebbing and flowing perpetually into the mills had waked and opened their months to sing.

Twenty thousand textile workers in Lawrence had walked out against a wage cut. It was a sudden, unplanned uprising. A fifty-four-hour week for women and children had been put into effect in Massachusetts, and the textile industry employed so many women and children that it meant a fifty-four-hour week for everyone. Consequently, there was a wage cut. It was a small cut, but it meant "four loaves of bread" to the workers.

Here live women, the mothers of many children, who work at night. These women have never rested. They do not know what an unburdened hour is. Five nights a week for ten hours they work for a quarter an hour at midnight.

I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.

On their side the workers had only the constitution. The other side had bayonets.

A. Philip Randolph is the type who believes in force and who has bragged about the technique of force which he used in the threatened march on Washington in 1941. This was the time when he intimidated the President of the United States with the threat of riotous conditions in the Nation's Capital at a moment when the whole Nation was preparing for World War II. Using this method, he and his collaborators secured the President's signature to the famous Executive Order No. 8802, which was the birth of the un-American bastard known as the Fair Employment Practice Committee. The word "reason" is not in his vocabulary. He does not know how to plead or ask for anything that he wants for the Negro people. Using the communistic pattern, he vociferously and obstreperously DEMANDS.

We are asked to permit a hundred men to go round to the house of a man who wishes to exercise the common law right in this country to sell his labour where and when he chooses, and to 'advise' him or 'peacefully persuade' him not to work. If peaceful persuasion is the real object, why are a hundred men required to do it? ... Every honest man knows why trade unions insist on the right to a strong numerical picket. It is because they rely for their objects neither on peacefulness nor persuasion. Those whom they picket cannot be peacefully persuaded. They understand with great precision their own objects, and their own interests, and they are not in the least likely to be persuaded by the representatives of trade unions, with different objects and different interests. But, though arguments may never persuade them, numbers may easily intimidate them. And it is just because argument has failed, and intimidation has succeeded, that the Labour Party insists upon its right to picket unlimited in respect of numbers.

It does seem to me that the laboring classes were possessed of the Devil. I believe in the free application of rifle balls, grape and canister to mobs.

The object sought to be accomplished is the improvement of the condition of man. The mode by which it is to be accomplished is that of increasing his productive power. The more food a man can raise, the more and better food may he consume, and the larger will be the surplus that can be appropriated to the purchase of clothing, to the education of his family, to the enlargement of his house, or to the improvement of his machinery, and the greater will be the amount of leisure that can be appropriated to the improvement of his modes of thought.

The demilitarization of Europe—where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it—has gone from the blessing of the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st.

Bloodletting is among the ingredients of political medicine.

War is the continuation of politics." In this sense war is politics and war itself is political action.... It can therefore be said that politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.

The masses in highly industrialized countries like England, the United States, or France are largely de-Christianized. Technology, and the way of life it produces, undermines Christianity far more effectively than do violent measures.

When federal marshals in Boston arrested Anthony Burns in 1854, a vigilance committee gathered at Faneuil Hall and declared that “resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.” Heavily armed with axes and pistols, they marched to the courthouse, where, in the ensuing battle, a federal officer was killed. In response, President Franklin Pierce, a Northern Democrat, mobilized the U.S. Army and Navy to transport Burns back to Virginia, at a cost of $ 100,000 (roughly equivalent to $ 4 million in 2012). As soldiers escorted the fugitive down the streets of Boston, church bells tolled in somber protest, and homeowners and shopkeepers turned their American flags upside down in a show of defiance.

To make peace, it is necessary to know how to make war.

Armies for the preservation of peace do not exist; they exist only for the triumphant exertion of war.

War is the sure result of the existence of armed men. That country which maintains a large standing army will sooner or later have a war. The man who prides himself on fisticuffs is going, some day, to meet a man who considers himself the better man, and they will test the issue.

Go, bid the soldiers shoot.

Anybody who has anybody in the armed forces, I don't care how well-trained they are, there's nothing safe about it.

There are no manifestos like cannon and musketry.

Battles decide everything.

People.. .love to say that 'Violence never solved anything.' But what solved Hitler? Was It a team of social workers? Was it putting daisies into the gun barrels of Nazi Panzer divisions? Was it a commission that tried to understand what made Hitler sorry? ?No. What solved Hitler was violence.