I will utter what I believe today, if it should contradict all I said yesterday.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Opinion
Responsibility educates.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Responsibility
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
Exigencies create the necessary ability to meet and conquer them.
—Wendell Phillips
If you want to be an orator, first get your great cause.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Reason
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
The heart is the best logician.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Heart
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: Opinion, Opinions, Justice
The best education in the world is that got by struggling to get a living.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Education
Revolutions are not made; they come.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Revolution
As the Greek said, many men know how to flatter; few know to praise.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Praise
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
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
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
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
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
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: Revolutions, Revolutionaries, Revolution
Aristocracy is always cruel.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Aristocracy
On a single winged word hath hung the destiny of nations.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Words
Political convulsions, like geological upheavings, usher in new epochs of the world’s progress.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Revolution
What is fanaticism today is the fashionable creed tomorrow, and trite as the multiplication table a week after.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Fanaticism
Difference of religion breeds more quarrels than difference of politics.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Religion
God gives manhood but one clue to success, utter and exact justice; that, he guarantees, shall be always expediency.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Justice
What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Religion
Agitation is the method that plants the school by the side of the ballot box.
—Wendell Phillips
What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Getting Going, Religion, Inaction, Procrastination
Every step of progress which the world has made has been from scaffold to scaffold, and from stake to state.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Progress
The heart is the best reflective thinker.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Heart
What is defeat?—Nothing but education; nothing but the first step to something better.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Defeat, Failures, Failure, Mistakes
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Lydia Maria Child American Abolitionist
- Harriet Beecher Stowe American Abolitionist
- Frederick Douglass American Abolitionist
- Thomas Wentworth Higginson American Reformer, Editor
- Charles William Eliot American Educator
- Louis Brandeis American Jurist
- John Weiss American Author
- James Russell Lowell American Poet, Critic
- William Lloyd Garrison American Abolitionist
- Elliot Richardson American Lawyer
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