Richard Grimes Quotes

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

I was anxious to save the great coal operators and all of the class of big propertied men, of which they were members, from the dreadful punishment which their own folly would have brought on them if I had not acted.

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

the leaders of the business community with few exceptions, have chosen to wage a one-sided class war in this country

The presumed causes of Americas troubles can be summed up simply: the evils of unlimited competition, and abuses by those with economic power.

It is the conflicting interests of the man and the woman, the home and the shop, the Church and the State, which cause the economic struggle, the war and the strife with which mankind is cursed and which make all long and pray for the reign of peace.

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

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.

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?

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.

The real problem is that the way that power is given out in our society pits us against each other.

Juridically they are equal; but economically the worker is the serf of the capitalist … The worker always has the right to leave his employer, but has he the means to do so? No, he does it in order to sell himself to another employer. He is driven to it by the same hunger which forces him to sell himself to the first employer.

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

As labor is the common burden of our race so the effort of some to shift their share of the burden on to the shoulders of others is the great durable curse of the race.

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.

The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.

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

... wholly in the interest of the creditor classes, the banking fraternity, and the commercial world, without proper provision for the debtor classes and those who toil, produce and sustain the country.

…in every city are found two diverse humors, and this arises from the fact that the common people desire neither to be commanded nor oppressed by the great, and the powerful men desire to command and oppress the people..

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.

The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.

The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor - these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small-businessmen, the investments set aside for old age -- other people's money -- these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in..

Sometimes it's hard to tell which evokes more anger – businesses that know and care about nothing except profits or governments that know and care about nothing except power and paper-pushing. However, anger is not a solution. Anger attempts to shout down problems, and it never works.

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.

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