Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Wendell Phillips (American Abolitionist)

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

As the Greek said, many men know how to flatter; few know to praise.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Praise

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

Difference of religion breeds more quarrels than difference of politics.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Religion

Wants awaken intellect. To gratify them disciplines intellect. The keener the want, the lustier the growth.
—Wendell Phillips

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

What is fanaticism today is the fashionable creed tomorrow, and trite as the multiplication table a week after.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Fanaticism

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

Boredom, after all, is a form of criticism.
—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: Truth, Opinions

God gives manhood but one clue to success, utter and exact justice; that, he guarantees, shall be always expediency.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Justice

Revolutions never go backwards.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Revolutionaries, Progress, Revolution, Revolutions

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
Topics: Public opinion, Law

What is defeat?—Nothing but education; nothing but the first step to something better.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Defeat, Failures, Failure, Mistakes

To be as good as our fathers we must be better, imitation is not discipleship.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Imitation

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

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

The keener the want the lustier the growth.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Desires

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

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

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

The heart is the best reflective thinker.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Heart

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

On a single winged word hath hung the destiny of nations.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Words

Many know how to flatter, few know how to praise.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Praise

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, Justice, Opinions

We live under a government of men and morning newspapers.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Journalism

Every step of progress which the world has made has been from scaffold to scaffold, and from stake to state.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Progress

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

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