Top 100 Wendell Phillips Quotes
#1. The press is the exclusive literature of the million; to them it is literature, church, and college.
Wendell Phillips
#2. Let us always remember that he does not really believe his own opinion, who dares not give free scope to his opponent.
Wendell Phillips
#3. Political convulsions, like geological upheavings usher in new epochs of the world's progress.
Wendell Phillips
#4. The Puritan did not stop to think; he recognized God in his soul, and acted.
Wendell Phillips
#5. The man who, for party, forsakes righteousness, goes down; and the armed battalions of God march over him.
Wendell Phillips
#6. The hand entrusted with power becomes, either from human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people
Wendell Phillips
#8. The best education in the world is that got by struggling to get a living.
Wendell Phillips
#11. Our agitation, you know, helps keep yours alive in the rank and file.
Wendell Phillips
#12. How prudently most men creep into nameless graves, while now and then one or two forget themselves into immortality.
Wendell Phillips
#13. Common sense does not ask an impossible chessboard, but takes the one before it and plays the game.
Wendell Phillips
#14. Politicians are like the bones of a horse's foreshoulder-not a straight one in it.
Wendell Phillips
#17. The Puritan's idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.
Wendell Phillips
#18. No free people can lose their liberties while they are jealous of liberty. But the liberties of the freest people are in danger when they set up symbols of liberty as fetishes, worshipping the symbol instead of the principle it represents.
Wendell Phillips
#20. Baron Grimm declared that, as a rule, it was easy for little minds to attain splendid positions, because they devoted all their ability to the one object.
Wendell Phillips
#24. Insurrection of thought always precedes insurrection of arms.
Wendell Phillips
#25. The labor movement means just this: it is the last noble protest of the American people against the power of incorporated wealth.
Wendell Phillips
#26. Take the whole range of imaginative literature, and we are all wholesale borrowers. In every matter that relates to invention, to use, or beauty or form, we are borrowers.
Wendell Phillips
#27. Two kinds of men generally best succeed in political life; men of no principle, but of great talent; and men of no talent, but of one principle - that of obedience to their superiors.
Wendell Phillips
#28. Sin is not taken out of man, as Eve was out of Adam, by putting him to sleep.
Wendell Phillips
#29. Great political questions stir the deepest nature of one-half the nation, but they pass far above and over the heads of the other half.
Wendell Phillips
#30. The best use of good laws is to teach men to trample bad laws under their feet.
Wendell Phillips
#31. No class is safe unless government is so arranged that each class has in its hands the means of protecting itself. That is the idea of republics.
Wendell Phillips
#32. Let me make the newspapers, and I care not what is preached in the pulpit or what is enacted in Congress.
Wendell Phillips
#33. What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action.
Wendell Phillips
#37. Do not take the yardstick of your ignorance to measure what the ancients knew, and call everything which you do not know lies. Do not call things untrue because they are marvelous, but give them a fair consideration.
Wendell Phillips
#38. Will the slave fight? If any man asks you, tell him No. But if anyone asks you will a Negro fight, tell him Yes!
Wendell Phillips
#39. It is only liquid currents of thought that move men and the world
Wendell Phillips
#40. When I want to find the vanguard of the people I look to the uneasy dreams of an aristocracy and find what they dread most.
Wendell Phillips
#41. What gunpowder did for war, the printing press has done for the mind.
Wendell Phillips
#43. The reformer is careless of numbers, disregards popularity, and deals only with ideas, conscience, and common sense. He feels, with Copernicus, that as God waited long for an interpreter, so he can wait for his followers.
Wendell Phillips
#44. It is but the littleness of man that seeth no greatness in trifles.
Wendell Phillips
#45. Government began in tyranny and force, began in the feudalism of the soldier and bigotry of the priest; and the ideas of justice and humanity have been fighting their way, like a thunderstorm, against the organized selfishness of human nature.
Wendell Phillips
#46. Government is only a necessary evil, like other go-carts and crutches. Our need of it shows exactly how far we are still children. All governing overmuch kills the self-help and energy of the governed.
Wendell Phillips
#47. To hear some men talk of the government, you would suppose that Congress was the law of gravitation, and kept the planets in their places.
Wendell Phillips
#49. The heart beats louder and the soul hears quicker in silence and solitude.
Wendell Phillips
#50. Whether in chains or in laurels, liberty knows nothing but victories.
Wendell Phillips
#52. Debt is the fatal disease of republics, the first thing and the mightiest to undermine governments and corrupt the people.
Wendell Phillips
#53. The work resembles a breech delivery-one which is expressed in rhythmic lurches, stabs of phrase and vocal ornamentation designed to express agitation rather than decorative grace.
Wendell Phillips
#54. Government arrogates to itself that it alone forms men. Everybody knows that government never began anything. It is the whole world that thinks and governs.
Wendell Phillips
#57. Freedom to preach was first gained, dragging in its train freedom to print.
Wendell Phillips
#58. Today it is not big business that we have to fear. It is big government.
Wendell Phillips
#59. Every step of progress the world has made has been from scaffold to scaffold, and from stake to stake.
Wendell Phillips
#60. If there is anything in the universe that can't stand discussion, let it crack.
Wendell Phillips
#61. God gives manhood but one clew to success,
utter and exact justice; that he guarantees shall be always expediency.
Wendell Phillips
#62. It is easy to be independent when all behind you agree with you, but the difficulty comes when nine hundred and ninety-nine of your friends think you are wrong.
Wendell Phillips
#63. Example acquires tenfold authority when it speaks from the grave.
Wendell Phillips
#64. Experience is a safe light to walk by, and he is not a rash man who expects to succeed in future from the same means which have secured it in times past.
Wendell Phillips
#65. Seldom ever was any knowledge given to keep, but to impart; the grace of this rich jewel is lost in concealment.
Wendell Phillips
#66. Popular opinion is oftenest, what Carlyle pronounced it to be, a lie!
Wendell Phillips
#67. Republics exist only on the tenure of being constantly agitated ... There is no republican road to safety but in constant distrust.
Wendell Phillips
#68. Immoral laws are doubtless void, and should not be obeyed.
Wendell Phillips
#70. Governments exist to protect the rights of minorities. The loved and the rich need no protection: they have many friends and few enemies.
Wendell Phillips
#71. Revolutions are not made: they come. A revolution is as natural a growth as an oak. It comes out of the past. Its foundations are laid far back.
Wendell Phillips
#73. Though plunged in ills and exercised in care,
Yet never let the noble mind despair.
Wendell Phillips
#74. Truth is one forever absolute, but opinion is truth filtered through the moods, the blood, the disposition of the spectator.
Wendell Phillips
#75. You can always get the truth from an American statesman after he has turned seventy, or given up all hope of the Presidency.
Wendell Phillips
#76. To be as good as our fathers we must be better, imitation is not discipleship.
Wendell Phillips
#77. Right is the eternal sun; the world cannot delay its coming.
Wendell Phillips
#78. What is defeat? Nothing but education; nothing but the first step to something better.
Wendell Phillips
#79. What is fanaticism today is the fashionable creed tomorrow, and trite as the multiplication table a week after.
Wendell Phillips
#80. Difference of religion breeds more quarrels than difference of politics.
Wendell Phillips
#81. Politics is but the common pulse-beat, of which revolution is the fever-spasm.
Wendell Phillips
#82. The heritage of the past is the seed that brings forth the harvest of the future.
Wendell Phillips
#83. Physical bravery is an animal instinct; moral bravery is much higher and truer courage.
Wendell Phillips
#85. Law is nothing unless close behind it stands a warm, living public opinion.
Wendell Phillips
#86. Exigencies create the necessary ability to meet and conquer them.
Wendell Phillips
#87. The republic which sinks to sleep, trusting to constitutions and machinery, to politicians and statesmen, for the safety of its liberties, never will have any.
Wendell Phillips
#90. Write on my gravestone: 'Infidel, Traitor.', infidel to every church that compromises with wrong; traitor to every government that oppresses the people.
Wendell Phillips
#93. Health lies in labor, and there is no royal road to it but through toil.
Wendell Phillips
#94. The penny-papers of New York do more to govern this country than the White House at Washington.
Wendell Phillips
#95. Education is the only interest worthy the deep, controlling anxiety of the thoughtful man.
Wendell Phillips
#96. Neither do I acknowledge the right of Plymouth to the whole rock. No, the rock underlies all America: it only crops out here.
Wendell Phillips
#99. Liberty knows nothing but victories. Soldiers call Bunker Hill a defeat; but liberty dates from it though Warren lay dead on the field.
Wendell Phillips
#100. I will utter what I believe today, if it should contradict all I said yesterday.
Wendell Phillips
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