Inspirational Quotes by Wendell Phillips (American Abolitionist)

Inspirational Quotations 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

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

We read history through our prejudices.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: History

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: Law, Public opinion

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

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

Experience is a safe light to walk by, and he is not a rash man who expects success in the future by the same means which secured it in the past.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Experience

Responsibility educates.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Responsibility

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

How prudently most men creep into nameless graves, while now and then one or two forget themselves into immortality.
—Wendell Phillips

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

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

What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Getting Going, Procrastination, Religion, Inaction

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

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

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

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

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

Wants awaken intellect. To gratify them disciplines intellect. The keener the want, the lustier the growth.
—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: Reading, Books

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

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

One on God’s side is a majority.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: God

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

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

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
Topics: Imitation

Physical bravery is an animal instinct; moral bravery is a much higher and truer courage.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Bravery