Wendell Phillips Quotes

Wendell Phillips provides earnest, inspirational thoughts on revolution, creativity, and striving beyond our ancestors.

56 quotes

1. 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.

2. The best use of laws is to teach men to trample bad laws under their feet.

3. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

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

5. One on God's side is a majority.

6. Every man meets his Waterloo at last.

7. Whether in chains or in laurels, Liberty knows nothing but victories.

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

9. Difference of religion breeds more quarrels than difference of politics.

10. Revolutions never go backward.

11. Aristocracy is always cruel.

12. 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.

13. Christianity is a battle not a dream.

14. Governments exist to protect the rights of minorities. The loved and the rich need no protection: they have many friends and few enemies.

15. If you want to be an orator, first get your great cause.

16. Insurrection of thought always precedes insurrection of arms.

17. It is only liquid currents of thought that move men and the world.

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

19. Politics is but the common pulse-beat, of which revolution is the fever-spasm.

20. Seldom ever was any knowledge given to keep, but to impart; the grace of this rich jewel is lost in concealment.

21. The best education in the world is that got by struggling to get a living.

22. The heart is the best reflective thinker.

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

24. 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.

25. Today it is not big business that we have to fear. It is big government.

26. 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.

27. We live under a government of men and morning newspapers.

28. What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

29. What is defeat? Nothing but education. Nothing but the first step to something better.

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

31. 'It's just what Wendell Phillips said,' she declared. ''The Puritan's idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.'' Mrs. Ware in Chapter II of the novel The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic, 1896.

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

33. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few.

34. 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.

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

36. Every government is always growing corrupt.

37. Neither do I acknowledge the right of Plymouth to the whole rock. No, the rock underlies all America: it only crops out here.

38. The heart beats louder and the soul hears quicker in silence and solitude.

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

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

41. Wants awaken intellect. To gratify them disciplines intellect. The keener the want the lustier the growth.

42. Popular opinion is oftenest, what Carlyle pronounced it to be, a lie!

43. 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.

44. 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.

45. What gunpowder did for war, the printing-press has done for the mind; and the statesman is no longer clad in the steel of special education, but every reading man is his judge.

46. Our agitation, you know, helps keep yours alive in the rank and file.

47. Will the slave fight? If any man asks you, tell him No. But if anyone asks you will a Negro fight, tell him Yes!

48. 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.

49. How prudently most men creep into nameless graves, while now and then one or two forget themselves into immortality.

50. 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.

51. 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.

52. The slowest of us cannot but admit that the world moves.

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

54. Example acquires tenfold authority when it speaks from the grave.

55. Liberty knows nothing but victories. Soldiers call Bunker Hill a defeat; but liberty dates from it though Warren lay dead on the field.

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