Wendell Phillips Quotes

What is defeat? Nothing but education; nothing but the first steps to something better. —WENDELL PHILLIPS

Write on my gravestone: 'Infidel, Traitor.', infidel to every church that compromises with wrong; traitor to every government that oppresses the people.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

How prudently most men creep into nameless graves, while now and then one or two forget themselves into immortality.

What is defeat? Nothing but education; nothing but the first step to something better.

What gunpowder did for war, the printing press has done for the mind.

What is defeat? Nothing but education; nothing but the first steps to something better. —WENDELL PHILLIPS I

The manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten.

The American abolitionist Wendell Phillips did in fact say that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” He added that “the manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten.

External vigilance is the price of liberty.

Law is nothing unless close behind it stands a warm, living public opinion.

On September 3, an especially hostile audience baited Johnson in Cleveland, where his behavior flirted with new lows. When a heckler yelled that Johnson should “hang Jeff Davis,” the president rejoined, “Why not hang Thad Stevens and Wendell Phillips?”62 When someone in the crowd hollered, “Is this dignified?” Johnson shot back: “I care not for dignity.

Republics exist only on the tenure of being constantly agitated.... There is no republican road to safety but in constant distrust.

When I want to find the vanguard of the people I look to the uneasy dreams of an aristocracy and find what they dread most.

The American abolitionist Wendell Phillips did in fact say that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

What is defeat? Nothing but education; nothing but the first steps to something better. — WENDELL PHILLIPS

I heard Mr. Ingersoll many years ago in Chicago. The hall seated 5,000 people; every inch of standing-room was also occupied; aisles and platform crowded to overflowing. He held that vast audience for three hours so completely entranced that when he left the platform no one moved, until suddenly, with loud cheers and applause, they recalled him. He returned smiling and said: 'I'm glad you called me back, as I have something more to say. Can you stand another half-hour?' 'Yes: an hour, two hours, all night,' was shouted from various parts of the house; and he talked on until midnight, with unabated vigor, to the delight of his audience. This was the greatest triumph of oratory I had ever witnessed. It was the first time he delivered his matchless speech, 'The Liberty of Man, Woman, and Child'. I have heard the greatest orators of this century in England and America; O'Connell in his palmiest days, on the Home Rule question; Gladstone and John Bright in the House of Commons; Spurgeon, James and Stopford Brooke, in their respective pulpits; our own Wendell Phillips, Henry Ward Beecher, and Webster and Clay, on great occasions; the stirring eloquence of our anti-slavery orators, both in Congress and on the platform, but none of them ever equalled Robert Ingersoll in his highest flights. {Stanton's comments at the great Robert Ingersoll's funeral}

Christianity is a battle, not a dream.

Wendell Phillips’s namesake, Wendell Garrison, son of William Lloyd Garrison, regretted that Pillsbury, Foster, and Phillips were inclined “to distrust everybody, to endeavor by every ingenious device to find evidence that the government is the enemy of the black man & every officer under it unworthy to be trusted.” He disapproved of their “[c]austic criticism, snap judgments, & wholesale asseveration,” as well as their tendency to have “only eyes for the shadows of the night & do not see the flood of daylight which is driving the blackness away.

Belknap replied, “Slavery hath been abolished here by public opinion.” Understanding the importance of public sentiment, abolitionists pioneered the practice of radical agitation in a democracy. They did not put forward a detailed plan of emancipation. Rather, their aim, explained Wendell Phillips, perhaps the movement’s greatest orator, was “to alter public opinion,” to bring about a moral transformation whereby white Americans recognized the humanity and equal rights of blacks. By changing public discourse, by redefining the politically “possible,” the abolitionist movement affected far more Americans than actually joined its ranks.42

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels saw that the “mean whites” (as they called them) of the South were hopeless politically. They felt that nothing could be done with them but to render them powerless until they died out of old age. This was not a unique observation. Wendell Phillips, the great Radical abolitionist, bluntly pleaded in 1870: “Now is the time … to guarantee the South against the possible domination or the anger of the white race. We adhere to our opinion that nothing, or not much, except hostility, can be expected of two-thirds of the adult white men. They will go to their graves unchanged. No one of them should ever again be trusted with political rights. And all the elemental power of civilization should be combined and brought into play to counterwork the anger and plots of such foes.

God has given us a conscience superior to all law,” said Wendell Phillips. The individual’s conscience and the Golden Rule top any written law. There is such a thing as righteous lawbreaking.

What is defeat? Nothing but education; nothing but the first step to something better.

Among these little affairs was one which we called “Company K’s Skirmish,” because it brought out the fact that this company, which was composed entirely of South Carolina men, and had never shone in drill or discipline, stood near the head of the regiment for coolness and courage,—the defect of discipline showing itself only in their extreme unwillingness to halt when once let loose. It was at this time that the small comedy of the Goose occurred,—an anecdote which Wendell Phillips5 has since made his own. One of the advancing line of skirmishers, usually an active fellow enough, was observed to move clumsily and irregularly. It soon appeared that he had encountered a fine specimen of the domestic goose, which had surrendered at discretion. Not wishing to lose it, he could yet find no way to hold it but between his legs; and so he went on, loading, firing, advancing, halting, always with the goose writhing and struggling and hissing in this natural pair of stocks. Both happily came off unwounded, and retired in good order at the signal, or some time after it; but I have hardly a cooler thing to put on record.

The task is to gather together a minority determined to make it impossible for anyone to be white. It is a strategy of creative provocation, like Wendell Phillips advocated and John Brown carried out.

Wendell Phillips declared: “Only by unintermitted agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.… Republics exist only on the tenure of being constantly agitated.

It's just what Wendell Phillips said,” she declared. “' The Puritan's idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.

For not guaranteeing Black male suffrage, Wendell Phillips blasted the Fourteenth Amendment as a “fatal and total surrender.” Republicans argued that omitting suffrage was strategically necessary. They told Black male suffragists that “‘the negro must vote,’ but the issue must be avoided now so as ‘to keep up a two thirds power in Congress.

Uncompromising opposition to slavery's expansion, emancipaion, the arming of black troops - all enjoyed little support when first proposed, yet all had come to be embraced by the mainstream of Republican opinion. "These are no times of ordinary politics, " declared Wendell Phillips. "These are eformative hours: the natinal purpose and thought grows and ripens in 30 days as much as ordinary years bring it forward."...Whatever the merits of legal and political equality for blacks, a correspondent of moderate Ohio Senator John Sherman noted, "if you reconstruction upon any principle short of this, you cause a continuous political strife which will last until the thing is obtained.

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery,” Lincoln replied in Greeley’s rival paper, Washington’s National Intelligencer. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.” In the New York Tribune, rising abolitionist Wendell Phillips hammered Lincoln’s remarks as “the most disgraceful document that ever came from the head of a free people.

In 1963, Choh Hao Li, chairman and lone tenured faculty member in the Institute of Experimental Biology at Berkeley, announced that he had isolated and purified his sixth pituitary hormone, lipotropin. The magnitude of such a feat is clear considering that only one other person had ever purified a hormone, and that person was not coincidentally a student of Li's. The purification of lipotropin should have been a reason to celebrate; however, Li's colleagues at Berkeley acknowledged but did not rejoice in his success. As they perceived it, endocrinology was a scientific field that came out of the clinical sciences, which meant that Li's research was completely unsound, and they put enormous pressure on him to change his scientific topic. When that did not work, Wendell Stanley tried to 'promote [Li] out of the Virus Laboratory,' then later University Chancellor Clark Kerr threatened to discontinue the Institute for Experimental Biology because it did not fit with Berkeley's commitment to pure research. Things got infinitely worse for Li, of course, because he became perceived as less qualified with each professional achievement. [...] C. H. Li's travails at Berkeley are only half the story. In 1969, five years after transferring from Berkeley to UCSF, Li and his laboratory assistants assembled a highly complex synthetic version of human growth hormone (HGH) that was biologically active and could promote the growth of bones and muscle tissue. Rather than ignore or criticize the work, however, journalists waxed eloquently [sic] about Li's creation of HGH. One described it as no less than a panacea for most of the world's problems. Others clearly saw specific applications: 'it might now be . . . possible to tailor-make hormones that can inhibit breast cancer.' Li's discovery of synthetic HGH 'constituted a truly . . . great research breakthrough [that had] obvious applications,' ranging from 'human growth and development to . . . treatment of cancer and coronary artery disease.' Desperate letters poured in too; athletes wanted to know if HGH would help them become faster, bigger, stronger, and dwarfs from all over the world begged for samples of HGH or to volunteer as experimental subjects. Unlike at Berkeley, Li's discovery made him a hero at UCSF. None other than UCSF Chancellor Phillip Lee described Li's discovery as 'meticulous, painstaking, and brilliant research' and then tried to capitalize on the moment by asking the public and their political representatives to increase federal support of bioscience research. 'Research money is dwindling fast,' repeated Lee to anyone who cared to listen. 'We've proven than synthesis can be done, now all we need is the money and time to prove its tremendous value.' It is not surprising that federal and state money began to pour into Li's lab. What is shocking, however, is how quickly Li achieved scientific acclaim, not because he changed, but because the rest of the world around him changed so much.

The poet, when he wrote "Thou wilt come no more, gentle ANNIE," was clearly laboring under a mistake. If he had written "Thou wilt be sure to come again next season, gentle ANNIE," he would have hit it. Lecture committees know this. Miss DICKINSON earns her living by lecturing. Occasionally she takes a turn at scrubbing pavements, or going to hear WENDELL PHILLIPS on "The Lost Arts," or other violent exertion, but her best hold is lecturing. She has followed the business ever since she was a girl, and twenty-four (24) years of steady application have made her no longer a Timid Young Thing. She is not afraid of audiences any more. It is a favorite recreation of the moral boot-blacks and pious

Nature, when she adds difficulties, adds brains. —Emerson. Exigencies create the necessary ability to meet and conquer them. —Wendell Phillips. Many men owe the grandeur of their lives to their tremendous difficulties. —Spurgeon. The rugged metal of the mine Must burn before its surface shine. —Byron.

3 Beware the one-party state. The parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent from the start. They exploited a historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents. So support the multi-party system and defend the rules of democratic elections. Vote in local and state elections while you can. Consider running for office. Thomas Jefferson probably never said that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” but other Americans of his era certainly did. When we think of this saying today, we imagine our own righteous vigilance directed outward, against misguided and hostile others. We see ourselves as a city on the hill, a stronghold of democracy, looking out for threats that come from abroad. But the sense of the saying was entirely different: that human nature is such that American democracy must be defended from Americans who would exploit its freedoms to bring about its end. The American abolitionist Wendell Phillips did in fact say that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” He added that “the manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten.