Walter Reuther Quotes

For centuries man has struggled to divide up economic scarcity. There was too little food for the hungry, too little clothing for the naked. Now for the first time in the history of mankind, we have within our grasp the economic tools of unprecedented abundance which can end man's ageless struggle against want and misery. The same scientific and technical know-how which brought forth the H-bomb and guided missiles gives to the world automation and the tools of economic abundance. Will mankind have the vision and common sense to use the new tools of abundance to usher in an era of human progress and human fulfillment?

The great challenge before us is to find a way to get people and nations working together in the positive and rewarding task of peace as they have repeatedly joined together in the senseless and destructive waging of war.

You cannot save democracy in a vacuum of idealism. You have got to be motivated by idealism, but you have got to also be fighting the hard problem of practical politics.

All the learned men with all their wisdom, with all of the legal niceties they can put together on the finest of parchment, cannot produce one ton of steel.

One thing we must do, most of all, in the future, is to harness the atom for peace and get all of the miners out of the earth.

I've read in the papers, as you do, about juvenile delinquency. I've always had a feeling that the problem in America is not juvenile delinquency, but adult delinquency. Our children are not failing us—it is we who are failing our children.

I have been saying for a long time that I believe the more young Americans who are trained to join with other young people in the world to be sent abroad with slide rule, textbook, and medical kit to help people help themselves with the tools of peace, the fewer young people will need to be sent with guns and weapons of war.

We are going to keep preaching the gospel that freedom and democracy in peace are indivisible values in the world and that no one can have them unless they are universal and all people may share them.

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

We say to American industry, if you can afford to pay pension plans to people who don't need them, then by the eternal gods you are going to have to pay them to people who do need them.

I ask this simple question. I ask it of you and I ask it of my fellow Americans everywhere. Why is it that we have the courage to mobilize the power of America to meet the challenge of war, but we fail to have the same courage to mobilize America to meet the challenge of peace?

Let us never forget that he who would serve God must prove that he is worthy by serving man.

When the employer can divide you and pit white against black, American-born against foreign-born, he can divide and rule and exploit everyone.

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.

No man and no people live as an island unto themselves.