Wendell Phillips

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

Wendell Phillips (29 November 1811 – 2 February 1884), born in Boston, Massachusetts, was an American abolitionist, Native American advocate and orator.

Sourced

• 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.
  • Speech (January 8, 1852)^{[specific citation needed]}

• The best use of laws is to teach men to trample bad laws under their feet.
  • Speech (April 12, 1852)^{[specific citation needed]}

• Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
  • Speech (January 28, 1852)^{[specific citation needed]} (This was already a familiar saying in the 1830s.).

• What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action.
  • Speech (December 21, 1855)^{[specific citation needed]}

• One on God's side is a majority.
  • Lecture in Brooklyn (November 1, 1859)^{[specific citation needed]}

• Every man meets his Waterloo at last.
  • Lecture in Brooklyn (November 1, 1859)^{[specific citation needed]}

• Whether in chains or in laurels, Liberty knows nothing but victories.
  • Lecture in Brooklyn (November 1, 1859)^{[specific citation needed]}

• Truth is one forever absolute, but opinion is truth filtered through the moods, the blood, the disposition of the spectator.
  • Idols (October 4, 1859)^{[specific citation needed]}

• Difference of religion breeds more quarrels than difference of politics.
  • Speech (November 7, 1860)^{[specific citation needed]}

• I think the first duty of society is justice.
  • Disunion (January 21, 1861)^{[specific citation needed]}

• Revolutions never go backward.
  • Speech (February 17, 1861)^{[specific citation needed]}

• Aristocracy is always cruel.
  • Address on Toussaint L'Ouverture (1861)^{[specific citation needed]}

• 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.
  • Lecture: The Lost Arts, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

• "It's just what Wendell Phillips said," she declared. "'The Puritan's idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.'"
  • Mrs. Ware in Chapter II of the novel The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic, 1896.