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

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

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

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

Christianity is a battle not a dream.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Christianity, Battle, Christians

Revolutions are not made; they come.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Revolution

Boredom, after all, is a form of criticism.
—Wendell Phillips

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

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

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, Revolutions, Revolutionaries

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

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

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

Aristocracy is always cruel.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Aristocracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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: Inaction, Procrastination, Religion, Getting Going

If you want to be an orator, first get your great cause.
—Wendell Phillips
Topics: Reason

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

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

Exigencies create the necessary ability to meet and conquer them.
—Wendell Phillips

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

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