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31 Wendell Phillips Quotes

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

Wendell Phillips 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.

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

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  3. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

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

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

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  6. Every man meets his Waterloo at last.

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

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

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

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  10. Revolutions never go backward.

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    Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

  11. Aristocracy is always cruel.

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  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.

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  13. Christianity is a battle not a dream.

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

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

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  16. Insurrection of thought always precedes insurrection of arms.

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

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

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

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

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

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  22. The heart is the best reflective thinker.

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

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  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.

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

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  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.

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

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

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

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

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  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.

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