Walter Reuther

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"These are the sober facts. This is where we are. We stand there in that delicate, precarious balance on the rim of hell, and on the other side is this brave new world that lies ready to be realized. This is one of the great tragedies of the world—and you history teachers perhaps know it better than I—that we find chapter after chapter of the history books filled with the stories of mans inhumanity to man and of the great wars. In those great wars of the worlds history, many nations achieved their highest expression of collective action—they worked, they marched, they sacrificed, and they died because they were driven forward by the negative motivations of war and because of their common fears and common hatreds. I believe that the great challenge of the leadership of the world is to find a way to tap the great spiritual reservoir, the great spiritual power that lies deep within the human breast, and find a way to get people working, marching, building, and sacrificing because of positive peacetime motivations and because they have common hopes, common aspirations, and common faith."

"Free labor understands and acts in the knowledge the the struggle for peace and the struggle for human freedom are inseparably tied together with the struggle for social justice."

"The crisis in the world is not economic, military, or political; essentially, it is a moral crisis. It is a reflection of mans growing inhumanity to man, which finds its most horrible expression in the total destruction now made possible by the H-bomb. I believe our problem is a reflection of the fact that there is a growing and most serious moral and cultural gap between the progress we have made as a people in the physical sciences, and our lack of progress in the human and social sciences. We know much better how to work with the machines than we know how to live with people."

"The American Dream is not about gadgets. It’s not about the size of our gross national product. It’s not about the level of technological sophistication. The American Dream is about man. It’s about broadening the opportunities and facilitating the growth of every human being, so that each person can reach out and achieve a sense of purpose and fulfillment."

"We have a saying in the union: "If a fellow looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, the possibility is that he is a duck." That is the way with a Communist. If the guy does everything that the party does, the prospects are very good that he is a party member or fellow traveler."

"Labor is not fighting for a larger slice of the national pie. Labor is fighting for a larger pie."

"The trouble is that industry operates on the basis of these double economic and moral standards. They say to the worker when he is too old to work and too young to die, You cannot have security in your old age, that is reserved to only the blue bloods, only the ones who were smart enough to pick the right grandfather before they were born. They can have security, but if you live on the wrong side of the railroad tracks you are not entitled to it."

"Theres a direct relationship between the ballot box and the bread box, and what the union fights for and wins at the bargaining table can be taken away in the legislative halls."

"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."