Time & Perspective Quote by Samuel Gompers

Gompers doesn’t praise time as a soft, self-help abstraction; he treats it like a scarce resource workers are routinely robbed of. Coming from the architect of American craft unionism, “time” is shorthand for the entire labor question: the length of the workday, the tyranny of the clock, the way exhaustion narrows a life until it becomes nothing but wage labor and recovery. Calling time “the most valuable thing on earth” is a tactical inversion of capitalism’s own language. Employers talk about productivity; Gompers talks about human capacity.

The repetition of “time to” reads like a bargaining platform disguised as moral philosophy. Think, act, build “fraternal relations” (a pointed nod to union solidarity), improve ourselves, become “independent citizens”: each clause expands what labor struggles are for. Not just higher pay, but a thicker democracy. The subtext is blunt: without leisure and security, civic life withers. A worker without time cannot deliberate, organize, read, vote intelligently, or even maintain the relationships that make collective power possible.

Notably, he balances “better men” and “better women,” a progressive touch for an era when much labor rhetoric was overtly masculine, even if “fraternal” betrays the movement’s gendered habits. The line also carries a disciplined optimism: reform is framed as self-making, not resentment. It’s an argument meant to win the middle ground - presenting shorter hours and labor rights not as class warfare, but as the precondition for a population capable of freedom.