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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.

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
Form
Government
Anything
Governs
Whole
Began
Never
Forms
Men
Thinks
Thinking
Everybody
World
Alone

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The Puritan's idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.
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Government began in tyranny and force, began in the feudalism of the soldier and bigotry of the priest and the ideas of justice and humanity have been fighting their way, like a thunderstorm, against the organized selfishness of human nature.
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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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Revolutions are not made, they come.
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Governments exist to protect the rights of minorities. The loved and the rich need no protection: they have many friends and few enemies.
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The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.
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Hearts are stronger than swords.
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The man who, for party, forsakes righteousness, goes down and the armed battalions of God march over him.
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Brains and character rule the world. The most distinguished Frenchman of the last century said: Men succeed less by their talents than their character. There were scores of men a hundred years ago who had more intellect than Washington. He outlives and overrides them all by the influence of his character.
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Though plunged in ills and exercised in care, Yet never let the noble mind despair.
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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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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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I think the first duty of society is justice.
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War and Niagara thunder to a music of their own.
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Every step of progress the world has made has been from scaffold to scaffold, and from stake to stake.
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Politics is but the common pulse-beat, of which revolution is the fever-spasm.
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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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Sin is not taken out of man, as Eve was out of Adam, by putting him to sleep.
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One on God's side is a majority.
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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.
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