Wendell Phillips Quotes

What is defeat? Nothing but education, nothing but the first step to something better.

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

Physical bravery is an animal instinct; moral bravery is much higher and truer courage.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few. The manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten. The living sap of today outgrows the dead rind of yesterday. The hand entrusted with power becomes, either form human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continued oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot; only by unintermitted agitation can a people be sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.

The heritage of the past is the seed that brings forth the harvest of the future.

No class is safe unless government is so arranged that each class has in its hands the means of protecting itself. That is the idea of republics.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few.

There is nothing stronger than human prejudice.

I think the first duty of society is justice.

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

The community which does not protect its humblest and most hated member in the free utterance of his opinions, no matter how false or hateful, is only a gang of slaves. If there is anything in the universe that can't stand discussion, let it crack.

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

The penny-papers of New York do more to govern this country than the White House at Washington.

Will the slave fight? If any man asks you, tell him No. But if anyone asks you will a Negro fight, tell him Yes!

If there is anything in the universe that can't stand discussion, let it crack.

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.

Let us always remember that he does not really believe his own opinion, who dares not give free scope to his opponent.

Today it is not big business that we have to fear. It is big government.

I will utter what I believe today, if it should contradict all I said yesterday.

It is easy to be independent when all behind you agree with you, but the difficulty comes when nine hundred and ninety-nine of your friends think you are wrong.

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

Do not take the yardstick of your ignorance to measure what the ancients knew, and call everything which you do not know lies. Do not call things untrue because they are marvelous, but give them a fair consideration.

Every government is always growing corrupt.

The Puritan's idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.

No free people can lose their liberties while they are jealous of liberty. But the liberties of the freest people are in danger when they set up symbols of liberty as fetishes, worshipping the symbol instead of the principle it represents.