Wendell Phillips Quotes

“Write on my gravestone: 'Infidel, Traitor.', infidel to every church that compromises with wrong; traitor to every government that oppresses the people.”

— Wendell Phillips

“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

“To be as good as our fathers we must be better, imitation is not discipleship.”

— Wendell Phillips

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

“Physical bravery is an animal instinct; moral bravery is much higher and truer courage.”

— Wendell Phillips

“Truth is one forever absolute, but opinion is truth filtered through the moods, the blood, the disposition of the spectator.”

— Wendell Phillips

“The labor movement means just this: it is the last noble protest of the American people against the power of incorporated wealth.”

— Wendell Phillips

“What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action.”

— Wendell Phillips

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

Many know how to flatter, few know how to praise.

— Wendell Phillips

What is fanaticism today is the fashionable creed tomorrow, and trite as the multiplication table a week after.

— Wendell Phillips

“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

“Exigencies create the necessary ability to meet and conquer them.”

— Wendell Phillips

“Insurrection of thought always precedes insurrection of arms.”

— Wendell Phillips

“Aristocracy is always cruel.”

— Wendell Phillips

“One on God's side is a majority.”

— Wendell Phillips

“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

The paleontological evidence before us today clearly demonstrates ordered progressive change with the successive development of new faunal and floral assemblages through the changing epochs of our earth's history. There should be no real conflict between science, which is the search for truth, and Christ's teachings, which I hold to be truth itself. It is only when scientists remove God from creation that the Christian is faced with an irreconcilable situation.

— Wendell Phillips

“Brains and character rule the world. The most distinguished Frenchman of the last century said: Men succeed less by their talents than their character. There were scores of men a hundred years ago who had more intellect than Washington. He outlives and overrides them all by the influence of his character.”

— Wendell Phillips

“Health lies in labor, and there is no royal road to it but through toil.”

— Wendell Phillips

“Though plunged in ills and exercised in care,
Yet never let the noble mind despair.”

— Wendell Phillips

“Republics exist only on the tenure of being constantly agitated ... There is no republican road to safety but in constant distrust.”

— Wendell Phillips

“The hand entrusted with power becomes, either from human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people”

— Wendell Phillips

“Organize, and stand together. Claim something together, and at once; let the nation hear a united demand from the laboring voice, and then, when you have got that, go on after another; but get something.”

— Wendell Phillips

“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

“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

“We measure genius by quality, not by quantity.”

— Wendell Phillips

The man who, for party, forsakes righteousness, goes down; and the armed battalions of God march over him.

— Wendell Phillips

“Never forgive at the ballot box!”

— Wendell Phillips

“Freedom to preach was first gained, dragging in its train freedom to print.”

— Wendell Phillips

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

“Immoral laws are doubtless void, and should not be obeyed.”

— Wendell Phillips

“Republics exist only on tenure of being agitated.”

— Wendell Phillips

“The press is the exclusive literature of the million; to them it is literature, church, and college.”

— Wendell Phillips

“Sin is not taken out of man, as Eve was out of Adam, by putting him to sleep.”

— Wendell Phillips

“Society,
the only field where the sexes have ever met on terms of equality, the arena where character is formed and studied, the cradle and the realm of public opinion, the crucible of ideas, the world's university, at once a school and a theater, the spur and the crown of ambition, the tribunal which unmasks pretension and stamps real merit, the power that gives government leave to be, and outruns the lazy Church in fixing the moral sense of the eye.”

— Wendell Phillips

It is but the littleness of man that seeth no greatness in trifles.

— Wendell Phillips

“The Puritan did not stop to think; he recognized God in his soul, and acted.”

— Wendell Phillips

“Let us always remember that he does not really believe his own opinion, who dares not give free scope to his opponent.”

— Wendell Phillips

“Revolutions are not made, they come.”

— Wendell Phillips

“Politicians are like the bones of a horse's foreshoulder-not a straight one in it.”

— Wendell Phillips

“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

“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

“Right is the eternal sun; the world cannot delay its coming.”

— Wendell Phillips

“Eternal vigilence is the price of liberty.”

— Wendell Phillips

“I will utter what I believe today, if it should contradict all I said yesterday.”

— Wendell Phillips

“It is only liquid currents of thought that move men and the world”

— Wendell Phillips

“Education is the only interest worthy the deep, controlling anxiety of the thoughtful man.”

— Wendell Phillips

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

“The heart is the best logician.”

— Wendell Phillips