Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel Gompers

A country without strikes might sound like a well-oiled machine. Gompers treats it as a warning label. The line flips a common assumption of “order”: if workers never stop work, it’s not proof of harmony, it’s evidence that pressure has been sealed so tightly it can’t vent. The brilliance is in the dare-like structure - “show me... and I’ll show you...” - which mimics courtroom logic while smuggling in a moral verdict. He’s not romanticizing disruption; he’s arguing that disruption is the price tag of freedom.

Gompers, a foundational figure in American labor and longtime leader of the AFL, spoke from an era when strikes were met with blacklists, private detectives, injunctions, and sometimes bullets. In that context, “no strikes” often meant not that workers were content, but that they were terrified, legally gagged, or simply excluded from political power. His intent is tactical as much as philosophical: to make the strike legible as democratic speech. If voting is the ballot box, striking is the workplace equivalent - collective leverage when institutions ignore you.

The subtext is also aimed at polite reformers who prefer “responsible” labor that never inconveniences anyone. Gompers calls that posture what it is: a demand for obedience dressed up as civic virtue. Liberty, in his telling, is noisy. It causes delays. It forces negotiations. A society that never tolerates that friction may be efficient, but it’s not free.