Unions Quotes

1. "The secret of a full life is to live and relate to others as if they might not be there tomorrow, as if you might not be there tomorrow. It eliminates the vice of procrastination, the sin of postponement, failed communications, failed communions. This thought has made me more and more attentive to all encounters. meetings, introductions, which might contain the seed of depth that might be carelessly overlooked. This feeling has become a rarity, and rarer every day now that we have reached a hastier and more superficial rhythm, now that we believe we are in touch with a greater amount of people, more people, more countries. This is the illusion which might cheat us of being in touch deeply with the one breathing next to us. The dangerous time when mechanical voices, radios, telephones, take the place of human intimacies, and the concept of being in touch with millions brings a greater and greater poverty in intimacy and human vision."
Author: Anaïs Nin

2. "Unions should not be lapdogs to a political party, they should be watchdogs for their members' interests."
Author: Andy Stern

3. "Manufacturing and other unskilled professions that were union jobs, that allowed people to live a middle-class life, are disappearing both because unions are disappearing and because of the global nature of the economy."
Author: Andy Stern

4. "In the political context fair means somebody that will vote for the unions or for the business. It can't mean that in the judicial context or we're in real trouble."
Author: Anthony Kennedy

5. "The trade unions and the Labour Party... failed miserably. Instead of giving concrete support, and calling upon workers to take industrial action, they did nothing."
Author: Arthur Scargill

6. "If a person is mean to their family but polite to complete strangers, they shouldn't go to extended family reunions – until they've mastered the diplomacy of sarcasm."
Author: Bauvard

7. "I hope I do not offend God by making my Communions in the frame of mind I have been describing. The command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand."
Author: C.S. Lewis

8. "Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand. Unless, of course, you can literally believe all that stuff about family reunions 'on the further shore,' pictured in entirely earthly terms. But that is all unscriptural, all out of bad hymns and lithographs. There's not a word of it in the Bible. And it rings false. We know it couldn't be like that. Reality never repeats. The exact same thing is never taken away and given back. How well the Spiritualists bait their hook! 'Things on this side are not so different after all.' There are cigars in Heaven. For that is what we should all like. The happy past restored."
Author: C.S. Lewis

9. "Many people do not realize that where unions have bargaining rights employers cannot raise wages or improve benefit plans any more than they can reduce them without of the consent of the union."
Author: Charles E. Wilson

10. "They said it was impossible to touch the third rail of politics, to take on public-sector unions and to reform a pension and health benefits system that was headed to bankruptcy. But with bipartisan leadership, we saved taxpayers $132 billion dollars over 30 years and saved retirees their pensions. We did it."
Author: Chris Christie

11. "What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence, is the instrument of this dreadful will. You can see the will to power in bedrooms, kitchens, factories, unions and the borders of states. Listen to this and remember it. The nation state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. QED, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence. Thus it ever was, so ever shall it be."
Author: David Mitchell

12. "Best to leave quietly, and no reunions. Move on, and look to the future. Plenty more faces out there."
Author: David Nicholls

13. "It is a nice sunny day; his bunions have stopped hurting. There is always something to celebrate, in Gerrit's view."
Author: Deborah Moggach

14. "I read old novels. The reason is simple: I prefer proper endings. Marriages and deaths, noble sacrifices and miraculous restorations, tragic separations and unhoped-for reunions, great falls and dreams fulfilled; these, in my view, constitute an ending worth the wait. They should come after adventures, perils, dangers and dilemmas, and wind everything up nice and neatly. Endings like this are to be found more commonly in old novels than new ones, so I read old novels."
Author: Diane Setterfield

15. "I love family reunions. Maybe next year we could pass out samurai swords."
Author: Doug Solter

16. "At first, I was shocked that Diane could even suggest this family reunion [on television], and then I realized this is just the way of the world, or at least the way of fin de siecle America. Not only would the next revolution be televised, but so would every other little stupid thing. It was already happening: Television reunions between adopted children and their birth parents..."
Author: Elizabeth Wurtzel

17. "In the 1970s, New York City avoided bankruptcy because wise political leaders like Gov. Hugh L. Carey believed both in strong labor unions and robust banks and companies."
Author: Felix Rohatyn

18. "As I, as a worker, came to know them, the aims of German trade unions were political, and there were a number of various trade unions with varied political views."
Author: Fritz Sauckel

19. "We plan to pick up another five seats in the Senate and hold the House through redistricting through 2012. And rather than negotiate with the teachers' unions and the trial lawyers and the various leftist interest groups, we intend to break them."
Author: Grover Norquist

20. "I don't think it's a great leap to go from civil unions to gay marriage - I may be in the minority in believing that."
Author: Harold Ford Jr.

21. "Everything is produced by the workers, and the minute they try to get something by their unions they meet all the opposition that can be mustered by those who now get what they produce."
Author: Harry Bridges

22. "But the question is to find and rear leaders that are really one with the masses. This can only be accomplished by the masses, the political parties and the Trade Unions, by means of the most severe struggle, also inwardly."
Author: Herman Gorter

23. "If you don't have collective agreements between unions and employers, governments have to legislate more."
Author: Jacques Delors

24. "The unions may continue to decline, but if they do, it'll be their fault."
Author: Jacques Delors

25. "Even in Britain, the trade unions tell me that employment contracts have less protection than in the past."
Author: Jacques Delors

26. "The unions still have a job to do, representing their members' interests to governments and parliaments. And I think collective agreements still have a role, alongside markets and laws."
Author: Jacques Delors

27. "Can't you see,Jimmy?It's not a war about our freedom,it's a power struggle between rulers and bosses wanting more land,more power.The likes of you and me are just cannon fodder in their draft war.We should have nothing to do with it,let alone be supporting it! The only fight that concerns the working man is the one the trades unions are fighting against the bosses.That's the only struggle I'm bothered about and I don't give a toss if they're British bosses or German!"
Author: Janet MacLeod Trotter

28. "For most of the 20th century, we didn't just enjoy economic success in Michigan, we defined it. Our innovators and entrepreneurs created the world's most productive companies, and our unions made sure that productivity led to broad middle class prosperity."
Author: Jennifer M. Granholm

29. "Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life."
Author: John Muir

30. "Fortunately the essence of this revelation did not escape Mary despite the angel's obscure speech, and, much surprised, she asked him, So Jesus is my son and the son of the Lord, Woman, what are you saying, show some respect for rank and precedence, what you must say is the son of the Lord and me, Of the Lord and of you, No, of the Lord and of you, You're confusing me, just answer my question, is Jesus our son, You mean to say the Lord's son because you only served to bear the child, So the Lord didn't choose me, Don't be absurd (...) Is there any real proof that it was the Lord's seed which engendered my first-born, Well, it's a delicate matter, and what you're demanding is nothing less than a paternity test which in these mixed unions, no matter how many analyses, tests, and globule counts one carries out, can never give conclusive results."
Author: José Saramago

31. "What, exactly, she had been protesting was subject to interpretation. To the poorest, her self-immolation was a response to enervating poverty. To the disabled, it reflected the lack of respect accorded the physically impaired. To the unhappily married, who were legion, it was a brave indictment of oppressive unions. Almost no one spoke of envy, a stone slab, a poorly made wall, or rubble that had fallen into rice."
Author: Katherine Boo

32. "Some people called me a fascist. That's mostly over, but there will be more attacks from the unions."
Author: Luis Fortuno

33. "Much of America is now in need of an equivalent of Mrs. Thatcher's privatization program in 1980s Britain, or post-Soviet Eastern Europe's economic liberalization in the early Nineties. It's hard to close down government bodies, but it should be possible to sell them off. And a side benefit to outsourcing the Bureau of Government Agencies and the Agency of Government Bureaus is that you'd also be privatizing public-sector unions, which are the biggest and most direct assault on freedom, civic integrity, and fiscal solvency."
Author: Mark Steyn

34. "In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as 'right-to-work.' It provides no 'rights' and no 'works.' Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining…. We demand this fraud be stopped."
Author: Martin Luther King Jr.

35. "Emotion is the surest arbiter of a poetic choice, and it is the priest of all supreme unions in the mind."
Author: Max Eastman

36. "Il peut arriver des situations (dans les régimes dictatoriaux, par exemple) où prendre publiquement position est dangereux ; pour le danseur ce l'est pourtant un peu moins que pour les autres, car, s'étant promené sous la lumière des projecteurs, visible de partout, il est protégé par l'attention du monde ; mais il a ses admirateurs anonymes qui, obéissant à son appel aussi splendide qu'irréfléchie, signent des pétitions, participent à des réunions interdites, manifestent dans la rue ; ceux-là seront traités sans ménagement et le danseur ne cédera jamais à la tentation sentimentale de se reprocher d'avoir causé leur malheur, sachant qu'une noble cause pèse plus que la vie d'un tel ou un tel. (chapitre 6)"
Author: Milan Kundera

37. "Remembering now all those farewells (fake farewells, worked-up farewells), Irena thinks: a person who messes up her goodbyes shouldn't expect much from her re-unions."
Author: Milan Kundera

38. "The unions might be good for the people who are in the unions but it doesn't do a thing for the people who are unemployed. Because the union keeps down the number of jobs, it doesn't do a thing for them."
Author: Milton Friedman

39. "I oppose same-sex marriage and civil unions but I support domestic partnership between gay and lesbian couples. I have no problem with gay and lesbian couples adopting. I support equal benefits for same-sex couples such as hospital visitation rights"
Author: Mitt Romney

40. "We don't have unions in South Carolina because we don't need unions in South Carolina."
Author: Nikki Haley

41. "At first everyone predicted that it would be impossible to hold these divergent people together, but aside from the skilled men, some of whom belonged to craft unions, comparatively few went back to the mills. And as a whole, the strike was conducted with little violence."
Author: Ray Stannard Baker

42. "Well, what there ought to be is an international labor organization, a confederation of the trade unions of all the countries speaking for the workers who are competing with one another, and talking about the difference in wage levels between, say, Europe and Indonesia."
Author: Richard Rorty

43. "(If I were a member of the class that rules, I would post men in all the neighborhoods of the nation, not to spy upon or club rebellious workers, not to break strikes or disrupt unions; but to ferret out those who no longer respond to the system in which they live. I would make it known that the real danger does not stem from those who seek to grab their share of wealth through force, or from those who try to defend their property through violence, for both of these groups, by their affirmative acts, support the values of the system in which they live. The millions that I would fear are those who do not dream of the prizes that the nation holds forth, for it is in them, though they may not know it, that a revolution has taken place and is biding its time to translate itself into a new and strange way of life.)"
Author: Richard Wright

44. "I'm prepared to fight as hard as I can against unions entering the University on behalf of our students."
Author: Ruth J. Simmons

45. "For small community banks and credit unions, like those in Central and Northern Wisconsin, the hundreds of new rules will require an estimated 2,260,631 labor hours just for compliance. Those are hours that your local bank or credit union will spend dealing with some Washington bureaucrat instead of focusing on the needs of customers like you."
Author: Sean Duffy

46. "You've been telling us about how to secure peace, but come on, now, General—just among us Rotarians and Rotary Anns—'fess up! With your great experience, don't you honest, cross-your-heart, think that perhaps—just maybe—when a country has gone money-mad, like all our labor unions and workmen, with their propaganda to hoist income taxes, so that the thrifty and industrious have to pay for the shiftless ne'er-do-weels, then maybe, to save their lazy souls and get some iron into them, a war might be a good thing? Come on, now, tell your real middle name, Mong General!"
Author: Sinclair Lewis

47. "I have no difficulty with the recognition of civil unions for non-traditional relationships but I believe in law we should protect the traditional definition of marriage."
Author: Stephen Harper

48. "We - again, the, the, the, the bastardization and the demonization over the last few years of teachers and of unions and of collective bargaining, that is not the answer."
Author: Tavis Smiley

49. "I oppose any attempt to grant homosexual unions the same legal privileges that civil government affords to traditional marriage and family life."
Author: Todd Akin

50. "Unions are susceptible to the same ills that befall all human societies."
Author: Tony Kushner

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