William Dudley Haywood Quotes

Workers cannot buy with their salaries what they have produced and at the same time copiously nourish the swarm of idlers who live upon their work.

Who is looking out for the working class? The answer is, Nobody!

Those who produce should have, but we know that those who produce the most - that is, those who work hardest, and at the most difficult and most menial tasks, have the least.

There can be no harmony between organized capitalists and organized labor. Our present wage system is slavery in its worst form.

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

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.

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

These interests of the workers, as the exploited and oppressed, class of society, are the same in all countries.

Capitalism robs you and makes a wage slave of you. The law upholds and protects that robbery. The government fools you into believing that you are independent and free. In this way you are fooled and duped every day of your life.

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

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.

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.

There is then a universal and forced tendency to reduce to the lowest the workers’ wages, and this law is sufficient to crush all the best intentions of employers, prisoners of the social order, by which, however, they benefit.

Every socialist recognizes the dependence of the workingman on the capitalist.

The fact of the matter is that the U.S. is run by an unusually class-conscious, dedicated business class that has a very violent labor history, much worse than in Europe.

This is the problem for which revolutionary theory has yet to find the right solution, if there is one. The difficulty is that the economic interests of the two classes are antagonistic.

While unions did not play a part in my family life when I was being brought up, my early years were most certainly spent in a working-class community.

We are the only class in history that has been left to fight its battles alone, unaided by the ruling powers. White labor and the freed black men had their champions, but where are ours?

The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own effort is able to develop only trade-union consciousness.

There will soon come an armed contest between capital and labor. They will oppose each other, not with words and arguments, but with shot and shell, gun-powder and cannon. The better classes are tired of the insane howling of the lower strata and they mean to stop them.

If work was a good thing, the rich would have it all and not let you do it.

The seeming antagonism between capital and labor is the result of deceptive appearance.

After World War I the resentment of the working class against all that it had to suffer was directed more against Morgan, Wall Street and private capital than the government.

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

The only thing that stands between corporate greed and poverty is the union.