Wendell Phillips Quotes
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He who stifles free discussion, secretly doubts whether what he professes to believe is really true.
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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.
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The heart is the best reflective thinker.
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Seldom ever was any knowledge given to keep, but to impart; the grace of this rich jewel is lost in concealment.
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Difference of religion breeds more quarrels than difference of politics.
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You can always get the truth from an American statesman after he has turned seventy, or given up all hope of the Presidency.
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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.
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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.
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What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action.
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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.
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Every man meets his Waterloo at last.
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Races love to be judged in two ways-by the great men they produce, and by the average merit of the mass of the race.
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To be as good as our fathers we must be better, imitation is not discipleship.
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What is fanaticism today is the fashionable creed tomorrow, and trite as the multiplication table a week after.
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Whether in chains or in laurels, liberty knows nothing but victories.
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Let me make the newspapers, and I care not what is preached in the pulpit or what is enacted in Congress.
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The best education in the world is that got by struggling to get a living.
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Governments exist to protect the rights of minorities. The loved and the rich need no protection: they have many friends and few enemies.
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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.
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If you want to be an orator, first get your great cause.
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Revolutions never go backward.
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The Negro race, instead of being that object of pity or contempt which we usually consider it, is entitled, judged by the facts of history, to a place close by the side of the Saxon.
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I think the first duty of society is justice.
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Sit not, like the figure on our silver coin, looking ever backward.