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

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

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