Wendell Phillips Quotes

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.

Christianity is a battle, not a dream.

In God's world there are no majorities, no minorities; one, on God's side, is a majority.

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.

[T]he 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.

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

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.

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

Revolutions never go backward.

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

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

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

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

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.