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I will utter what I believe today, if it should contradict all I said yesterday.

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
Utter
Yesterday
Belief
Today
Believe
Contradict

More quotes by Wendell Phillips

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Every step of progress the world has made has been from scaffold to scaffold, and from stake to stake.
Wendell Phillips
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Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty power is ever stealing from the many to the few.
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Politics is but the common pulse-beat, of which revolution is the fever-spasm.
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The hand entrusted with power becomes, either from human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people
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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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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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What is fanaticism today is the fashionable creed tomorrow, and trite as the multiplication table a week after.
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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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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.
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Physical bravery is an animal instinct moral bravery is much higher and truer courage.
Wendell Phillips
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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.
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Two kinds of men generally best succeed in political life men of no principle, but of great talent and men of no talent, but of one principle - that of obedience to their superiors.
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Many men know how to flatter, few men know how to praise.
Wendell Phillips
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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.
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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.
Wendell Phillips
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Let me make the newspapers, and I care not what is preached in the pulpit or what is enacted in Congress
Wendell Phillips
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What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action.
Wendell Phillips
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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.
Wendell Phillips
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The Puritan's idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.
Wendell Phillips
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To hear some men talk of the government, you would suppose that Congress was the law of gravitation, and kept the planets in their places.
Wendell Phillips