Wendell Phillips People Quotations

The labor movement means just this: It is the last noble protest of the American people against the power of incorporated wealth.

Debt is the fatal disease of republics, the first thing and the mightiest to undermine governments and corrupt the people.

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

The hand entrusted with power becomes, either from human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people

A large body of people, sufficient to make a nation, have come to the conclusion that they will have a government of a certain form. Who denies them the right? Standing with the principles of '76 behind us, who can deny them the right? ... I maintain on the principles of '76 that Abraham Lincoln has no right to a soldier in Fort Sumter. ... You can never make such a war popular. ... The North never will endorse such a war.

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.