Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel Gompers

Restless ambition is the engine here, and Gompers knows it can be spun as greed by people who prefer workers quiet and grateful. So he preempts the critique: yes, labor will ask for more, and it will keep asking. The repetition is deliberate, a rhetorical drumbeat that turns “more” from a vice into a principle. Wanting more isn’t moral failure; it’s the logical response to an economy built on extracting “results” from human effort and handing them upward.

Gompers, the longtime leader of the American Federation of Labor, is often associated with “pure and simple unionism” - bread-and-butter demands like wages, hours, and conditions rather than sweeping ideological revolution. This line sits squarely in that tradition. It’s not utopian. It’s transactional, almost contractual: labor produces; labor is owed. “Results of our labor” reframes pay and dignity as rightful returns, not favors granted by benevolent employers or politicians.

The subtext is a warning disguised as a vow. A workforce that stops wanting more has been domesticated; a workforce that keeps wanting more remains politically alive. “Never cease to demand” elevates insistence into strategy: progress comes from organized pressure, not patient faith in the market’s goodwill. In the late 19th and early 20th century - an era of violent strikes, injunctions, and private militias - that insistence wasn’t rhetorical flourish. It was survival language.

What makes the quote work is its blunt refusal of closure. There’s no promised endpoint where justice is “achieved” and everyone goes home. Gompers casts labor rights as a moving frontier: as productivity rises, expectations must rise with it, or else “progress” becomes just a prettier name for exploitation.