Wendell Phillips Quotes

I think the first duty of society is justice.

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.

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

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

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

Every man meets his Waterloo at last.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few. The manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten. The living sap of today outgrows the dead rind of yesterday. The hand entrusted with power becomes, either form human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continued oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot; only by unintermitted agitation can a people be sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.

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

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

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

The heritage of the past is the seed that brings forth the harvest of the future.

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.

Let me make the newspapers, and I care not what is preached in the pulpit or what is enacted in Congress

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

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

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.

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

There is nothing stronger than human prejudice.

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

My advice to a young man seeking deathless fame would be to espouse an unpopular cause and devote his life to it.

The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.

Common sense does not ask an impossible chessboard, but takes the one before it and plays the game.

Agitation is the atmosphere of the brains.

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

Christianity is a battle, not a dream.

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.

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

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

Agitation prevents rebellion, keeps the peace, and secures progress. Every step she gains is gained forever. Muskets are the weapons of animals. Agitation is the atmosphere of the brains.

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.

If there is anything in the universe that can't stand discussion, let it crack.

Debt is the fatal disease of republics, the first thing and the mightiest to undermine governments and corrupt the people.

Difference of religion breeds more quarrels than difference of politics.

Statutes are mere milestone, telling how far yesterday's thought had traveled; and the talk of the sidewalk today is the law of the land. With us, law in nothing unless close behind it stands a warm, living public opinion.

Revolutions never go backwards.

Boredom, after all, is a form of criticism.

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

Aristocracy is always cruel.

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.

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

Law is nothing unless close behind it stands a warm, living public opinion.

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

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

The penny-papers of New York do more to govern this country than the White House at Washington.

One on God's side is a majority.

We measure genius by quality, not by quantity.

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.

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

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