Wendell Phillips Quotes

48 Sourced Quotes

Government arrogates to itself that it alone forms men. Everybody knows that government never began anything. It is the whole world that thinks and governs.

Wendell Phillips
He who stifles free discussion, secretly doubts whether what he professes to believe is really true.

Wendell Phillips
Every step of progress the world has made has been from scaffold to scaffold, and from stake to stake.

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

Wendell Phillips
Law is nothing unless close behind it stands a warm, living public opinion.

Wendell Phillips
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
Governments exist to protect the rights of minorities. The loved and the rich need no protection: they have many friends and few enemies.

Wendell Phillips
Republics exist only on the tenure of being constantly agitated.... There is no republican road to safety but in constant distrust.

Wendell Phillips
Politics is but the common pulse-beat, of which revolution is the fever-spasm.

Wendell Phillips
Debt is the fatal disease of republics, the first thing and the mightiest to undermine governments and corrupt the people.

Wendell Phillips
Whether in chains or in laurels, Liberty knows nothing but victories.

Wendell Phillips
We live under a government of men and morning newspapers.

Wendell Phillips
Organize, and stand together. Claim something together, and at once; let the nation hear a united demand from the laboring voice, and then, when you have got that, go on after another; but get something.

Wendell Phillips
The labor movement means just this: It is the last noble protest of the American people against the power of incorporated wealth.

Wendell Phillips
Write on my gravestone: "Infidel, Traitor" — infidel to every church that compromises with wrong; traitor to every government that oppresses the people.

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
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
Truth is one forever absolute, but opinion is truth filtered through the moods, the blood, the disposition of the spectator.

Wendell Phillips