Wendell Phillips Quotes

I will utter what I believe today, if it should contradict all I said yesterday.

To be as good as our fathers we must be better, imitation is not discipleship.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few. The manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten. The living sap of today outgrows the dead rind of yesterday. The hand entrusted with power becomes, either form human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continued oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot; only by unintermitted agitation can a people be sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.

The heritage of the past is the seed that brings forth the harvest of the future.

Popular opinion is oftenest, what Carlyle pronounced it to be, a lie!

The labor movement means just this: It is the last noble protest of the American people against the power of incorporated wealth.

The best education in the world is that got by struggling to get a living.

My advice to a young man seeking deathless fame would be to espouse an unpopular cause and devote his life to it.

Christianity is a battle, not a dream.

The Puritan did not stop to think; he recognized God in his soul, and acted.

Though plunged in ills and exercised in care,Yet never let the noble mind despair.

Society,–the only field where the sexes have ever met on terms of equality, the arena where character is formed and studied, the cradle and the realm of public opinion, the crucible of ideas, the world’s university, at once a school and a theater, the spur and the crown of ambition, the tribunal which unmasks pretension and stamps real merit, the power that gives government leave to be, and outruns the lazy Church in fixing the moral sense of the eye.