Wendell Phillips Quotes

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

The manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten.

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.

Sit not, like the figure on our silver coin, looking ever backward.

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

[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.

External vigilance is the price of liberty.

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.

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

Revolutions never go backward.

Republics exist only on the tenure of being constantly agitated.... There is no republican road to safety but in constant distrust.

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

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

Christianity is a battle, not a dream.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.