Wendell Phillips Quotes

• 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.
• The best use of laws is to teach men to trample bad laws under their feet.
• Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
• What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action.
• One on God's side is a majority.
• Every man meets his Waterloo at last.
• Whether in chains or in laurels, Liberty knows nothing but victories.
• Truth is one forever absolute, but opinion is truth filtered through the moods, the blood, the disposition of the spectator.
• Difference of religion breeds more quarrels than difference of politics.
• Revolutions never go backward.
• Aristocracy is always cruel.
• 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.
• Christianity is a battle not a dream.
• Governments exist to protect the rights of minorities. The loved and the rich need no protection: they have many friends and few enemies.
• If you want to be an orator, first get your great cause.
• Insurrection of thought always precedes insurrection of arms.
• It is only liquid currents of thought that move men and the world.
• Many know how to flatter, few know how to praise.
• Politics is but the common pulse-beat, of which revolution is the fever-spasm.
• Seldom ever was any knowledge given to keep, but to impart; the grace of this rich jewel is lost in concealment.
• The best education in the world is that got by struggling to get a living.
• The heart is the best reflective thinker.
• To be as good as our fathers we must be better, imitation is not discipleship.
• 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.
• Today it is not big business that we have to fear. It is big government.
• 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.
• We live under a government of men and morning newspapers.
• What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.
• What is defeat? Nothing but education. Nothing but the first step to something better.
• Write on my gravestone: 'Infidel, Traitor.', infidel to every church that compromises with wrong; traitor to every government that oppresses the people.
• '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.

wendell phillips