Theodore Roosevelt Quotes

There is and always has been in an advanced stage of wealth and civilization, a conflict between labor and capital.

It would be well for those interested to reflect whether there now exists, or ever has existed, a wealthy and civilized community in which one portion did not live on the labor of another.... Remember that labor is the only source of wealth, and how small a portion of it, in all old and civilized countries, even the best governed, is left to those by whose labor wealth is created.

The business manager was doing fine back in his office while they were out on the line, hungry. And, so they started to see a lot of that and there was, that maybe the leadership had its own cause. More so than the miners, you know, it was like a power struggle.

In the struggle between capital and labor, more often than not capital has won, because the real source of value for most companies has historically been the hard assets that they owned and controlled.

Once the working classes were in chains, now they're in chain restaurants.

This trial is a fight between capital and labor, of which this is but a manifestation up here in the woods.

The whole contention lies between those that labor for a living and those that do not.

It would be possible to say without exaggeration that the miners' leaders were the stupidest men in England if we had not frequent occasion to meet the owners.

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.

Republicans turned against organized workers and abandoned the idea of promoting equality at the bottom of the economic scale. They turned their idea of economic harmony into a justification for supporting industrialists, who were the nation's job creators.

Late 19th-century America was basically a plutocratic enterprise while people toiled in mines and died of coal dust poisoning.

The wealthy have installed their slaves in the highest spheres of the state. The banks are privately owned. They are concerned solely with profits. They have no interest in the common good.

Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.

For reforms ameliorate the situation of the working class, they lighten the weight of the chains labour is burdened with by capitalism, but they are not sufficient to crush capitalism and to emancipate the workers from their tyranny.

If capital and labor ever do get together it's good night for the rest of us.

When the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century brought a rapid increase in wealth, the demand of workers for a fair share of the wealth they were creating was conceded only after riots and strikes.

With the laborers of England generally, does not the moral coercion of want subject their will as despotically to that of their employer, as the physical constraint does the soldier, the seaman, or the slave?

The strongest form of fight against the capitalist class is the strike. Strikes are necessary, ever again, against the capitalists’ tendency to increase their profits by lowering wages and increase the hours or the intensity of work.

The division of society into the producing and non-producing classes ... capital and labor.... Antagonism and opposition of interest is introduced in the community; capital and labor stand opposed.

Capitalists personally are often the mildest-mannered men that ever shattered a family or drained a workingman of his marrow.

If work were such a splendid thing the rich would have kept more of it for themselves.

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

There is no mutuality of interests ... between capital and labor. It is the iron heel of a soulless monopoly, crushing the manhood out of sovereign citizens.

The bloody capitalists cannot conclude an honorable peace. They can conclude only a dishonorable peace, based upon a division of spoils.

It is a sad commentary upon our form of government when every decision of the Supreme Court seems designed to fatten capital and starve and destroy labor.