Wendell Phillips
Every government is always growing corrupt.Collection: Government
The Puritan's idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.Collection: Ideas
No free people can lose their liberties while they are jealous of liberty. But the liberties of the freest people are in danger when they set up symbols of liberty as fetishes, worshipping the symbol instead of the principle it represents.Collection: Freedom
How prudently most men creep into nameless graves, while now and then one or two forget themselves into immortality.Collection: Men
My advice to a young man seeking deathless fame would be to espouse an unpopular cause and devote his life to it.Collection: Men
Popular opinion is oftenest, what Carlyle pronounced it to be, a lie!Collection: Lying
Great political questions stir the deepest nature of one-half the nation, but they pass far above and over the heads of the other half.Collection: Political
Christianity is a battle, not a dream.Collection: Inspirational
Common sense does not ask an impossible chessboard, but takes the one before it and plays the game.Collection: Games
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.Collection: Sex
The republic which sinks to sleep, trusting to constitutions and machinery, to politicians and statesmen, for the safety of its liberties, never will have any.Collection: Sleep
The reformer is careless of numbers, disregards popularity, and deals only with ideas, conscience, and common sense. He feels, with Copernicus, that as God waited long for an interpreter, so he can wait for his followers.Collection: Ideas
Never forgive at the ballot box!Collection: Forgiving
Immoral laws are doubtless void, and should not be obeyed.Collection: Law
Many men know how to flatter, few men know how to praise.Collection: Praise
It is only liquid currents of thought that move men and the worldCollection: Moving
The hand entrusted with power becomes, either from human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the peopleCollection: Hands
Let me make the newspapers, and I care not what is preached in the pulpit or what is enacted in CongressCollection: Caring
Hearts are stronger than swords.Collection: Heart
Health lies in labor, and there is no royal road to it but through toil.Collection: Lying
We measure genius by quality, not by quantity.Collection: Quality
Statutes are mere milestone, telling how far yesterday's thought had traveled; and the talk of the sidewalk today is the law of the land. With us, law in nothing unless close behind it stands a warm, living public opinion.Collection: Law
Government is only a necessary evil, like other go-carts and crutches. Our need of it shows exactly how far we are still children. All governing overmuch kills the self-help and energy of the governed.Collection: Children
Organize, and stand together. Claim something together, and at once; let the nation hear a united demand from the laboring voice, and then, when you have got that, go on after another; but get something.Collection: Voice
The Puritan did not stop to think; he recognized God in his soul, and acted.Collection: Thinking
The man who, for party, forsakes righteousness, goes down; and the armed battalions of God march over him.Collection: Integrity
Wants awaken intellect. To gratify them disciplines intellect. The keener the want the lustier the growth.Collection: Discipline
Every man meets his Waterloo at last.Collection: Destiny
The heart is the best logician.Collection: Heart
Eternal vigilence is the price of liberty.Collection: Freedom
It is but the littleness of man that seeth no greatness in trifles.Collection: Greatness
Education is the only interest worthy the deep, controlling anxiety of the thoughtful man.Collection: Education
Government arrogates to itself that it alone forms men. Everybody knows that government never began anything. It is the whole world that thinks and governs.Collection: Men
Right is the eternal sun; the world cannot delay its coming.Collection: Delay
Revolutions are not made, they come.Collection: Revolution
There is nothing stronger than human prejudice. A crazy sentimentalism, like that of Peter the Hermit, hurled half of Europe upon Asia, and changed the destinies of kingdoms.Collection: Crazy
The slowest of us cannot but admit that the world moves.Collection: Moving
Experience is a safe light to walk by, and he is not a rash man who expects to succeed in future from the same means which have secured it in times past.Collection: Mean
The paleontological evidence before us today clearly demonstrates ordered progressive change with the successive development of new faunal and floral assemblages through the changing epochs of our earth's history. There should be no real conflict between science, which is the search for truth, and Christ's teachings, which I hold to be truth itself. It is only when scientists remove God from creation that the Christian is faced with an irreconcilable situation.Collection: Christian
Peace, if possible, but justice at any rate.Collection: Justice
There is a very broad theory that society gets the right to hang, as the individual gets the right to defend himself. Suppose she does; there are certain principles which limit this right. Society has got the murderer within four walls; he never can do any more harm. Has society any need to take that man's life to protect itself? If any society has only the right that the individual has, she has no right to inflict the penalty of death, because she can effectually restrain the individual from ever again committing his offence.Collection: Wall
The press is the exclusive literature of the million; to them it is literature, church, and college.Collection: College
To be as good as our fathers, we must be better. Imitation is not discipleship. When some one sent a cracked plate to China to have a set made, every piece in the new set had a crack in it.Collection: Father
Baron Grimm declared that, as a rule, it was easy for little minds to attain splendid positions, because they devoted all their ability to the one object.Collection: Mind
Liberty knows nothing but victories. Soldiers call Bunker Hill a defeat; but liberty dates from it though Warren lay dead on the field.Collection: Soldier
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.Collection: War
Political convulsions, like geological upheavings usher in new epochs of the world's progress.Collection: Political
Agitation prevents rebellion, keeps the peace, and secures progress. Every step she gains is gained forever. Muskets are the weapons of animals. Agitation is the atmosphere of the brains.Collection: Animal
God gives manhood but one clew to success,--utter and exact justice; that he guarantees shall be always expediency.Collection: Giving