Wendell Phillips Quotes
What is defeat? Nothing but education, nothing but the first step to something better.
Physical bravery is an animal instinct; moral bravery is much higher and truer courage.
What is fanaticism today is the fashionable creed tomorrow, and trite as the multiplication table a week after.
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few.
Governments exist to protect the rights of minorities. The loved and the rich need no protection: they have many friends and few enemies.
The labor movement means just this: It is the last noble protest of the American people against the power of incorporated wealth.
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.
Write on my gravestone: 'Infidel, Traitor.', infidel to every church that compromises with wrong; traitor to every government that oppresses the people.
Let me make the newspapers, and I care not what is preached in the pulpit or what is enacted in Congress
How prudently most men creep into nameless graves, while now and then one or two forget themselves into immortality.
Liberty knows nothing but victories. Soldiers call Bunker Hill a defeat; but liberty dates from it though Warren lay dead on the field.
My advice to a young man seeking deathless fame would be to espouse an unpopular cause and devote his life to it.
Common sense does not ask an impossible chessboard, but takes the one before it and plays the game.
Truth is one forever absolute, but opinion is truth filtered through the moods, the blood, the disposition of the spectator.
The work resembles a breech delivery-one which is expressed in rhythmic lurches, stabs of phrase and vocal ornamentation designed to express agitation rather than decorative grace.
Agitation prevents rebellion, keeps the peace, and secures progress. Every step she gains is gained forever. Muskets are the weapons of animals. Agitation is the atmosphere of the brains.
Debt is the fatal disease of republics, the first thing and the mightiest to undermine governments and corrupt the people.
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.
The penny-papers of New York do more to govern this country than the White House at Washington.
Education is the only interest worthy the deep, controlling anxiety of the thoughtful man.
Experience is a safe light to walk by, and he is not a rash man who expects to succeed in future from the same means which have secured it in times past.
Baron Grimm declared that, as a rule, it was easy for little minds to attain splendid positions, because they devoted all their ability to the one object.
The man who, for party, forsakes righteousness, goes down; and the armed battalions of God march over him.
