Walter Reuther Quotes

We live in a world in which the common denominator that binds the human family together has been reduced to its simplest fundamental term—human survival.

Freedom, like peace, can be made secure only as it is made universal.

We must negotiate from unity and strength and stay firm on matters of principle and flexible on matters of procedure.

Democratic nations must seek and find unity in diversity, while Communists achieve unity through conformity.

Why do we have these machines? Is economic effort an end, or is it a means to an end? Obviously it must be a means to an end. And the end must be the enrichment of human life, and the expansion of frontiers for human growth, not for just the few, but for the many.

There is no greater calling than to serve your brother. There is no greater contribution than to help the weak. There is no greater satisfaction than to have done it well.

I am for the state only doing what people are unable to do in the absence of government action.

If we don't plan for the constructive and creative use of the growing measure of human leisure that we're going to have based upon our technological progress, we can wind up as a well-fed nation of morons.

Well, I want to say to these people in Congress that they have been on the longest sit-down strike in the history of America—eight long years. And we think it's about time that they terminate that sit-down strike on civil rights and begin to turn out some legislation.

The struggle against racial intolerance and racial discrimination and bigotry must be waged everywhere in the world wherever such immoral and ugly practices exist.

Free management must realize that in a free society there is no substitute for the voluntary discharge of social responsibility.

Now this essentially is the difference between the Republican party and the Democratic party. Philosophically, the Republican party believes that if you help big business to earn higher profit, they will then invest more money in plants. That will create more job opportunities. That will create full employment. They've got this trickle-down theory that you can build prosperity from the top down. The Democrats basically believe that you've got to build prosperity from the bottom up by expanding purchasing power, by doing the things that will make it possible for all the American people to participate in prosperity.

I happen to believe that this is the crux of where we're going in terms of the future of the American economy. I think that the basic problem is to find a way to work out the competing equities among the three groups—the worker, the stockholder, and the consumer—so that we share the abundance in a way that would create the dynamics of growth and expansion.

In the struggle for the hearts and minds of millions of yet uncommitted people in the economically underdeveloped portions of the world, the more young Americans we send to help as technical missionaries—with slide rule, with textbook, and with medical kit—to work in the pursuit of peace, the fewer we might need to send with guns and flame-throwers to resist Communist aggression on the battlefields.

The Supreme Court is living in the twentieth century and the Congress is still somewhere back in the dark nineteenth century. It's about time they catch up.