Wendell Phillips (1811–84) was an American abolitionist, orator, and social reformer. After the Civil War, he campaigned for the rights of women and championed the labor movement.
Born in Boston into a wealthy, aristocratic family, Phillips graduated at Harvard in 1831 and was called to the Bar in 1834. By 1837, he had given up his social status and potential political career to become the antislavery movement’s most powerful orator and a close associate of the abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison. He maintained that the U.S. Constitution immorally protected slaveholding and published The Constitution: A Pro-Slavery Compact (1844.)
Phillips advocated for defiance of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which stipulated that all run-away slaves, upon capture, be returned to their masters. Phillips maintained that slaves deserved not only their freedom but also land, education, and civil rights. He was a contributor to Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper The Liberator and Lydia Maria Child’s National Anti-Slavery Standard.
Phillips’s Speeches, Lectures, and Letters were collected in 1863 and 1891.
After the Civil War, Phillips championed the causes of temperance and universal suffrage and fought for the rights of women, freed slaves, and Native Americans.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Wendell Phillips
What gunpowder did for war, the printing press has done for the mind; the statesman is no longer clad in the steel of special education, but every reading man is his judge.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Books, Reading
Physical bravery is an animal instinct; moral bravery is a much higher and truer courage.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Bravery
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty power is ever stealing from the many to the few. The hand entrusted with power becomes the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continual oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot: only by unintermitted Agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.
—Wendell Phillips
What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Procrastination, Getting Going, Inaction, Religion
If you want to be an orator, first get your great cause.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Reason
Revolutions are not made; they come.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Revolution
Every step of progress which the world has made has been from scaffold to scaffold, and from stake to state.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Progress
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.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Prejudice
Agitation is the method that plants the school by the side of the ballot box.
—Wendell Phillips
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 theatre, 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.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Society
Many know how to flatter, few know how to praise.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Praise
Power is ever stealing from the many to the few. The manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day, or it is rotten.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Power
Common sense does not ask an impossible chessboard, but takes the one before it and plays the game.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Decisions, Life, Secrets of Success
God gives manhood but one clue to success, utter and exact justice; that, he guarantees, shall be always expediency.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Justice
The best education in the world is that got by struggling to get a living.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Education
The heart is the best reflective thinker.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Heart
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.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Government
Boredom, after all, is a form of criticism.
—Wendell Phillips
To be as good as our fathers we must be better, imitation is not discipleship.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Imitation
Aristocracy is always cruel.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Aristocracy
Difference of religion breeds more quarrels than difference of politics.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Religion
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.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Revolution, Revolutionaries, Revolutions
Exigencies create the necessary ability to meet and conquer them.
—Wendell Phillips
Truth is one forever absolute, but opinion is truth filtered through the moods, the blood, the disposition of the spectator.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Opinions, Truth
Revolutions never go backwards.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Progress, Revolution, Revolutions, Revolutionaries
Statutes are mere milestones, telling how far yesterday’s thought had travelled; and the talk of the sidewalk today is the law of the land.—With us, law is nothing unless close behind it stands a warm, living public opinion.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Opinions, Justice, Opinion
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.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Talent
Responsibility educates.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Responsibility
There is no Canaan in politics.—As health lies in labor, and there is no royal road to it but through toil, so there is no republican road to safety but in constant distrust.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Politics
Write on my gravestone: “Infidel, Traitor.”—infidel to every church that compromises with wrong; traitor to every government that oppresses the people.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Revolution
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