Denis Kearney Quotes

It is we the workers who built these palaces and cities here in Spain and in America and everywhere. We, the workers, can build others to take their place. And better ones! We are not in the least afraid of ruins.

What shall the workers do? Sit idly by and see the vast resources of nature and the human mind be utilized and monopolized for the benefit of the comparative few? No. The laborers must learn to think and act, and soon, too, that only by the power of organization, and common concert of action, can either their manhood be maintained, their rights to life (work to sustain it) be recognized, and liberty and rights secured.

Fellow workers, this is the Continental Congress of the working class. The aims and objects of this organization shall be to put the working class in possession of economic power.

That's the Rebel Girl, That's the Rebel Girl. To the working class she's a precious pearl. She brings courage, pride and joy To the fighting Rebel Boy We've had girls before, but we need some more In the Industrial Workers of the World For it's great to fight for freedom With a Rebel Girl

The working class must be emancipated by the working class., Woman must be given her true place in society by the working class. Child labor must be abolished by the working class. Society must be reconstructed by the working class. The working class must be employed by the working class ., The fruits of labor must be enjoyed by the working class. War, bloody war, must be ended by the working class.

We are not making this demand for the sake of a principle, but in the interests of the proletarian class.

Unions are about the collective leverage, the power of numbers versus the power of capital.

Make no mistake: The organization of the working class must be both economic and political. The capitalist is organized upon both lines. You must attack him on both.

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

The question is always 'What is the role of a labor movement?' How much is about collective bargaining, how much is about social change for all workers?

We have never yet had a labor Government that knew what taking power really means; they always act like second-class citizens.

The Labor Community is carrying on … a very significant and instructive struggle.

Any member of the party who … advocates crime, sabotage, or other methods of violence as a weapon of the working class to aid in its emancipation, shall be expelled from membership of the party.

Debs is greater than Lincoln. Debs is the spokesman of the great struggling working class of all races, nationalities, creeds, sexes.

Historians have often censored civil rights activists' commitment to economic issues and misrepresented the labor and civil rights movements as two separate, sometimes adversarial efforts. But civil rights and workers' rights are two sides of the same coin.

We are the workers' party. We are the party of the hard working individual.

People think that we're engaged with identity politics. The truth is that we're doing what the labor movement has always done - organizing people who are at the bottom.

To denigrate the union movement in this way is to denigrate the right and the ability of people who are not rich to organize and to accomplish things together.

I believe in trade unionism, and I believe in democracy, in democratic trade unionism.

Only with the tools of production in their own hands could the workers ever hope to control their own lives and receive the fruits of their labor.

People seem to know about May Day everywhere except where it began, here in the United States of America. That's because those in power have done everything they can to erase its real meaning.

Social democracy seeks and finds the ways, and particular slogans, of the workers' struggle only in the course of the development of this struggle, and gains directions for the way forward through this struggle alone.

Let the workers organize. Let the toilers assemble. Let their crystallized voice proclaim their injustices and demand their privileges. Let all thoughtful citizens sustain them, for the future of Labor is the future of America.

Neither, I must say with all due respect, is it the power of teachers and students. Basically the true and real power is with working people of all colors, of all beliefs, of all national origins.

The best thanks we could offer those who went before and raised the Irish working class from their knees was to press forward with determination and enthusiasm towards the ultimate goal of their efforts, a Co-operative Commonwealth for Ireland.