Wendell Phillips Quotes

[R]aces love to be judged in two ways—by the great men they produce, and by the average merit of the mass of the race.

[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.

Revolutions never go backward.

I think the first duty of society is justice.

Difference of religion breeds more quarrels than difference of politics.

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

Every man meets his Waterloo at last.

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

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

What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action.

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.

The best use of laws is to teach men to trample bad laws under their feet.

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.

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.

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.