Wendell Phillips
62 quotes
Biography
"Take the whole range of imaginative literature, and we are all wholesale borrowers. In every matter that relates to invention, to use, or beauty or form, we are borrowers."
"Write on my gravestone: "Infidel, Traitor" — infidel to every church that compromises with wrong; traitor to every government that oppresses the people."
"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."
"What gunpowder did for war, the printing press has done for the mind, and the statesman is no longer clad in the steel of special education, but every reading man is his judge."
"The best use of laws is to teach men to trample bad laws under their feet."
"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty — power is ever stealing from the many to the few…. The hand entrusted with power becomes … the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continual oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot: only by unintermitted Agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity."
"What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action."
"Truth is one forever, absolute; but opinion is truth filtered through the moods, the blood, the disposition, of the spectator."
"In God's world there are no majorities, no minorities; one, on God's side, is a majority."
"Every man meets his Waterloo at last."
"Whether in chains or in laurels, Liberty knows nothing but victories."
"I think the first duty of society is justice."
"Revolutions never go backward."
"Aristocracy is always cruel."
"Corruption does not so much rot the masses: it poisons Congress. Credit-Mobilier and money rings are not housed under thatched roofs: they flaunt at the Capitol. As usual in chemistry, the scum floats uppermost."
"The agitator must stand outside of organizations, with no bread to earn, no candidate to elect, no party to save, no object but truth — to tear a question open and riddle it with light."
"To be as good as our fathers we must be better."
"Sit not, like the figure on our silver coin, looking ever backward."
"Be not dismayed by a defeat. What is defeat! Nothing but education, nothing but the first step to something better. <!-- Fight the battle of life with courage. -->"
"Mister Toombs was willing to dissolve the Union to save slavery, Mister Phillips, to save liberty; while Mister Seward, denounced and derided by both, declared that the deepest instinct of the American people was for union. Reserved rights. State rights, limited powers, the advantages of union and disunion, were the cucumbers from which we were busily engaged in distilling light, overlooking the fact of nationality in discussing the conditions of union. We were speculating upon costume. We gravely proved that the clothes were the clothes of a woman, or of a child, without seeing that whatever the clothes might be there was a full-grown man inside of them. "The Constitution is a contract between sovereign States", shouted Mister Toombs, "let Georgia tear it and separate". "The Constitution is a league with hell", calmly replied Mister Phillips, "let New York cut off New Orleans to rot alone". "Oh, dear! it"s a dreadful dilemma", whimpered President Buchanan. "States have no right to secede, and the United States have no right to coerce. Oh, dear me! it"s perfectly awful! I"m the most patriotic of men, but what shall I do? what shall I do?" Separate! Cut off! Secede! It was of a living body they spoke, which, pierced anywhere, quivered everywhere."
"It's just what Wendell Phillips said," she declared. "'The Puritan's idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.'"
"Wendell Phillips says, “The best and greatest thing one is capable of doing, that is his sphere.”"
"Today it is not big business that we have to fear. It is big government."
"Responsibility educates."
"Today it is not big business that we have to fear. It is big government."