Leland Stanford Quotes

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

Labor and capital may be partners in theory, but they are enemies in fact.

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

The working classes in every country only learn to fight in the course of their struggles.

The failure of Socialism since 1945 is that whilst encouraging us all, the creators of wealth, to produce less through strikes, it has caused us all to demand a higher level of our own product.

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?

Ever greater grows the mass of the proletariat, ever vaster the army of the unemployed, ever sharper the contrast between oppressors and oppressed, ever fiercer that war of classes between bourgeoisie and proletariat which divides modern society into two hostile camps and is the common characteristic of ever industrial country.

A permanent division of labor inevitably creates occupational and class inequality and conflict.

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

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

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.

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

Workers do not strike every day, they cannot do that the way they function in the capitalist economy. The way they have to live by selling their labor power makes that impossible.

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.

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

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 worker retains no respect for the property “rights” of the profit-takers … He knows that the present laws of property were made by and for the capitalists. Therefore he does not hesitate to break them.

I am not given to Political Economy, but I can use my eyes. I have never seen the masters (mill owners) getting thin and haggard for want of food

To the working class there is no foreigner but the capitalist.

The labor movement was a reaction to capitalism.

Controlling capitalism has proved far more difficult than controlling anything else, because capitalism is based on the control of the many by the few—the reverse of the conventional definition of political democracy.

Political struggles are due, in the last analysis, to class struggles; these struggles increase in scope and seriousness as capital becomes concentrated …

As industry's tycoons of the Thirties got their wings clipped, labor's leaders in the Eighties are getting their wings clipped. Not because of any class-related antagonism, but because any excess, ultimately, is its own undoing.

Before there were unions, there was no middle class.