Wendell Phillips

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

To be as good as our fathers we must be better.

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.

Corruption does not so much rot the masses: it poisons Congress. Credit-Mobilier and money rings are not housed under thatched roofs: they flaunt at the Capitol. As usual in chemistry, the scum floats uppermost.

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

Aristocracy is always cruel.

[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.

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.