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
The keener the want the lustier the growth.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Desires
We read history through our prejudices.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: History
Exigencies create the necessary ability to meet and conquer them.
—Wendell Phillips
Physical bravery is an animal instinct; moral bravery is a much higher and truer courage.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Bravery
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.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Politics
Revolutions are not made; they come.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Revolution
The best education in the world is that got by struggling to get a living.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Education
Many know how to flatter, few know how to praise.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Praise
What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Religion, Getting Going, Inaction, Procrastination
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
What is defeat?—Nothing but education; nothing but the first step to something better.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Failures, Defeat, Mistakes, Failure
We live under a government of men and morning newspapers.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Journalism
Revolutions never go backwards.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Progress, Revolution
Agitation is the method that plants the school by the side of the ballot box.
—Wendell Phillips
Common sense does not ask an impossible chessboard, but takes the one before it and plays the game.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Life, Decisions
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
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
Difference of religion breeds more quarrels than difference of politics.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Religion
With us, law is nothing unless close, behind it stands a warm, living public opinion. Let that die or grow indifferent, and statutes was waste paper, lacking all executive force.
—Wendell Phillips
Aristocracy is always cruel.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Aristocracy
To be as good as our fathers we must be better, imitation is not discipleship.
—Wendell Phillips
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
The old Hindoo saw, in his dream, the human race led out to its various fortunes.—First, men were in chains, that went back to an iron hand—then he saw them led by threads from the brain, which went upward to an unseen hand. The first was despotism, iron, and ruling by force.—The last was civilization, ruling by ideas.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Civilization
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.
—Wendell Phillips
When Infinite Wisdom established the rule of right and honesty, He saw to it that justice should be always the highest expediency.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Justice
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: Reading, Books
Every step of progress which the world has made has been from scaffold to scaffold, and from stake to state.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Progress
I will utter what I believe today, if it should contradict all I said yesterday.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Opinion
One on God’s side is a majority.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: God
God gives manhood but one clue to success, utter and exact justice; that, he guarantees, shall be always expediency.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Justice
Wants awaken intellect. To gratify them disciplines intellect. The keener the want, the lustier the growth.
—Wendell Phillips
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: Justice, Opinion
Political convulsions, like geological upheavings, usher in new epochs of the world’s progress.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Revolution
If you want to be an orator, first get your great cause.
—Wendell Phillips
Christianity is a battle not a dream.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Battle, Christianity
Truth is one forever absolute, but opinion is truth filtered through the moods, the blood, the disposition of the spectator.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Truth
Responsibility educates.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Responsibility
The heart is the best logician.
—Wendell Phillips
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
Government is only a necessary evil, like other go-carts, and crutches. The need of it shows exactly how far we are still children.—All overmuch governing kills the self-help and energy of the governed.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Government
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