Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel Gompers

Gompers doesn’t flatter the rich with a moral lecture; he indicts them with a snapshot of reflex. The line is built like a street argument: “millions” versus “ten cents,” a grotesque imbalance that makes the wealthy man’s outrage feel less like principle and more like possessiveness. It’s not just that the rich want more. It’s that having more trains you to treat wanting as a right, while recasting everyone else’s wanting as a threat.

The phrase “everything he can lay his hands on” is doing heavy lifting. It’s physical, almost grabby, suggesting accumulation as instinct rather than strategy. Then comes the performance: “raise his voice.” Gompers flags the real mechanism of power here, not simply money but the ability to define the story publicly - to make a tiny wage demand sound like insolence, a disruption of “order,” a sin against the economy.

Calling the worker “the poor devil” isn’t sentimental; it’s moral staging. The worker is already framed as desperate, human, and cornered, while the millionaire is framed as insatiable and loud. That contrast is the argument: the supposed guardians of “responsibility” are often the least willing to accept limits.

Context matters. As the long-time leader of the American Federation of Labor, Gompers spent decades in a Gilded Age economy marked by industrial concentration, brutal working conditions, and fierce resistance to unions. The quote is a compact case for labor solidarity: if a system treats ten cents as radicalism and millions as normal, the fight isn’t about individual greed. It’s about who gets to call their greed legitimate.