Wendell Phillips quotes:

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Governments exist to protect the rights of minorities. The loved and the rich need no protection: they have many friends and few enemies.
Liberty knows nothing but victories. Soldiers call Bunker Hill a defeat; but liberty dates from it though Warren lay dead on the field.
The labor movement means just this: It is the last noble protest of the American people against the power of incorporated wealth.
Physical bravery is an animal instinct; moral bravery is much higher and truer courage.
Difference of religion breeds more quarrels than difference of politics.
Write on my gravestone: 'Infidel, Traitor.', infidel to every church that compromises with wrong; traitor to every government that oppresses the people.
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few.
The best education in the world is that got by struggling to get a living.
Debt is the fatal disease of republics, the first thing and the mightiest to undermine governments and corrupt the people.
Today it is not big business that we have to fear. It is big government.
What is defeat? Nothing but education. Nothing but the first step to something better.
If you want to be an orator, first get your great cause.
What is fanaticism today is the fashionable creed tomorrow, and trite as the multiplication table a week after.
What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.
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.
Seldom ever was any knowledge given to keep, but to impart; the grace of this rich jewel is lost in concealment.
Agitation is the atmosphere of the brains.
What is defeat? Nothing but education, nothing but the first step to something better.
Baron Grimm declared that, as a rule, it was easy for little minds to attain splendid positions, because they devoted all their ability to the one object.
You can always get the truth from an American statesman after he has turned seventy, or given up all hope of the Presidency.
The heart is the best reflective thinker.
One on God's side is a majority.
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.
Aristocracy is always cruel.
The reformer is careless of numbers, disregards popularity, and deals only with ideas, conscience, and common sense. He feels, with Copernicus, that as God waited long for an interpreter, so he can wait for his followers.
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.
Aristocracy is always cruel."
Law is nothing unless close behind it stands a warm, living public opinion.
The hand entrusted with power becomes, either from human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people
We live under a government of men and morning newspapers.
Let me make the newspapers, and I care not what is preached in the pulpit or what is enacted in Congress
War and Niagara thunder to a music of their own.
Neither do I acknowledge the right of Plymouth to the whole rock. No, the rock underlies all America: it only crops out here.
Popular opinion is oftenest, what Carlyle pronounced it to be, a lie!
What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action.
Write on my gravestone Infidel, Traitor, infidel to every church that compromises with wrong; traitor to every government that oppresses the people
How prudently we proud men compete for nameless graves, while now and then some starveling of Fate forgets himself into immortality
Debt is the fatal disease of republics, the first thing and the mightiest to undermine governments and corrupt the people
Aristocracy is always cruel
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.
Every step of progress the world has made has been from scaffold to scaffold, and from stake to stake.
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.
Truth is one forever absolute, but opinion is truth filtered through the moods, the blood, the disposition of the spectator.
Let me make the newspapers, and I care not what is preached in the pulpit or what is enacted in Congress.
Republics exist only on tenure of being agitated.
The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.
Insurrection of thought always precedes insurrection of arms.
The keener the want the lustier the growth.
Whether in chains or in laurels, liberty knows nothing but victories.
Responsibility educates.
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.
A large body of people, sufficient to make a nation, have come to the conclusion that they will have a government of a certain form. Who denies them the right? Standing with the principles of '76 behind us, who can deny them the right? ... I maintain on the principles of '76 that Abraham Lincoln has no right to a soldier in Fort Sumter. ... You can never make such a war popular. ... The North never will endorse such a war.
Boredom, after all, is a form of criticism.
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.
Christianity is a battle, not a dream.
Common sense does not ask an impossible chessboard, but takes the one before it and plays the game.
Do not take the yardstick of your ignorance to measure what the ancients knew, and call everything which you do not know lies. Do not call things untrue because they are marvelous, but give them a fair consideration.
Education is the only interest worthy the deep, controlling anxiety of the thoughtful man.
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.
Eternal vigilence is the price of liberty.
Every government is always growing corrupt.
Every man meets his Waterloo at last.
Example acquires tenfold authority when it speaks from the grave.
Exigencies create the necessary ability to meet and conquer them.
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.
Freedom to preach was first gained, dragging in its train freedom to print.
God gives manhood but one clew to success,--utter and exact justice; that he guarantees shall be always expediency.
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.
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.
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.
Health lies in labor, and there is no royal road to it but through toil.
Hearts are stronger than swords.
How prudently most men creep into nameless graves, while now and then one or two forget themselves into immortality.
I will utter what I believe today, if it should contradict all I said yesterday.
If there is anything in the universe that can't stand discussion, let it crack.
Immoral laws are doubtless void, and should not be obeyed.
It is but the littleness of man that seeth no greatness in trifles.
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.
It is only liquid currents of thought that move men and the world
Let us always remember that he does not really believe his own opinion, who dares not give free scope to his opponent.
Many know how to flatter, few know how to praise.
My advice to a young man seeking deathless fame would be to espouse an unpopular cause and devote his life to it.
Never forgive at the ballot box!
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.
On a single winged word hath hung the destiny of nations.
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.
Our agitation, you know, helps keep yours alive in the rank and file.
Peace, if possible, but justice at any rate.
Political convulsions, like geological upheavings usher in new epochs of the world's progress.
Politicians are like the bones of a horse's foreshoulder-not a straight one in it.
Politics is but the common pulse-beat, of which revolution is the fever-spasm.
Republics exist only on the tenure of being constantly agitated.... There is no republican road to safety but in constant distrust.
Revolution is the only thing, the only power, that ever worked out freedom for any people. The powers that have ruled long and learned to love ruling, will never give up that prerogative until they must, till they see the certainty of overthrow and destruction if they do not. To plant-to revolutionize-these are the twin stars that have ruled our pathway. What have we then to dread in the word Revolution-we, the children of rebels!
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.
Revolutions never go backwards.
Right is the eternal sun; the world cannot delay its coming.
Sin is not taken out of man, as Eve was out of Adam, by putting him to sleep.
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.
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.
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.
The best use of good laws is to teach men to trample bad laws under their feet.
The community which does not protect its humblest and most hated member in the free utterance of his opinions, no matter how false or hateful, is only a gang of slaves. If there is anything in the universe that can't stand discussion, let it crack.
The heart beats louder and the soul hears quicker in silence and solitude.
The heart is the best logician.
The heritage of the past is the seed that brings forth the harvest of the future.
The man who, for party, forsakes righteousness, goes down; and the armed battalions of God march over him.
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.
The penny-papers of New York do more to govern this country than the White House at Washington.
The press is the exclusive literature of the million; to them it is literature, church, and college.
The Puritan did not stop to think; he recognized God in his soul, and acted.
The Puritan's idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.
The republic which sinks to sleep, trusting to constitutions and machinery, to politicians and statesmen, for the safety of its liberties, never will have any.
The slowest of us cannot but admit that the world moves.
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.
There is a very broad theory that society gets the right to hang, as the individual gets the right to defend himself. Suppose she does; there are certain principles which limit this right. Society has got the murderer within four walls; he never can do any more harm. Has society any need to take that man's life to protect itself? If any society has only the right that the individual has, she has no right to inflict the penalty of death, because she can effectually restrain the individual from ever again committing his offence.
There is nothing stronger than human prejudice.
There is nothing stronger than human prejudice. A crazy sentimentalism, like that of Peter the Hermit, hurled half of Europe upon Asia, and changed the destinies of kingdoms.
Though plunged in ills and exercised in care, Yet never let the noble mind despair.
To be as good as our fathers, we must be better. Imitation is not discipleship. When some one sent a cracked plate to China to have a set made, every piece in the new set had a crack in it.

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