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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.

Wendell Phillips

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Wendell Phillips
Age: 72 †
Born: 1811
Born: November 29
Died: 1884
Died: February 2
Jurist
Lawyer
Politician
Boston
Massachusetts
Liberty
Libertarian
Worshipping
Freedom
Symbols
Fetish
Free
Principle
Liberties
People
Danger
Libertarianism
Instead
Symbol
Lose
Represents
Principles
Jealous
Fetishes
Loses
Propaganda
Freest

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Aristocracy is always cruel.
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What is defeat? Nothing but education, nothing but the first step to something better.
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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.
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Exigencies create the necessary ability to meet and conquer them.
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The work resembles a breech delivery-one which is expressed in rhythmic lurches, stabs of phrase and vocal ornamentation designed to express agitation rather than decorative grace.
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Republics exist only on tenure of being agitated.
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The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.
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No class is safe unless government is so arranged that each class has in its hands the means of protecting itself. That is the idea of republics.
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Common sense does not ask an impossible chessboard, but takes the one before it and plays the game.
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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.
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You can always get the truth from an American statesman after he has turned seventy, or given up all hope of the Presidency.
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War and Niagara thunder to a music of their own.
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God gives manhood but one clew to success,--utter and exact justice that he guarantees shall be always expediency.
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If you want to be an orator, first get your great cause.
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It is but the littleness of man that seeth no greatness in trifles.
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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.
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The labor movement means just this: It is the last noble protest of the American people against the power of incorporated wealth.
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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.
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