Wendell Phillips Quotes

Our war cries opened the deaf ears of the almighty government and its accomplices.

My fellow revolutionaries, liberation is a noble cause. We must fight to obtain it.

The unsuccessful strugglers against tyranny have been the chief martyrs of treason laws in all countries.

I'll continue fighting as long as these social injustices exist.

Without rebellion, mankind would stagnate, and injustice would be irremediable.

We might not be back. I might be in jail. I might be anywhere. But when I leave, you'll remember I said, with the last words on my lips, that I am a revolutionary. And you're going to have to keep on saying that. You're going to have to say that I am a proletariat; I am the people.

To those who had ordered them to death, one of them said: “We die because the people are asleep and you will die because the people will awaken.”

When wrongs are pressed because it is believed they will be borne, resistance becomes morality.

Power is never so overwhelming that there's no room for resistance.

The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people.

I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born.

Writing is powerful. Whether it's a little girl hiding from the Nazis in an attic, or Amnesty International writing letters on behalf of political prisoners, the power of telling stories is usually what causes change.

Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

An oppressed people will always rise.

The seed of revolution is repression.

History dictates that unresponsive governments force ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to the cops just isn't going to work. This thinking is fostered by the establishment; they like nothing better than love and nonviolence.

Neither God, nor angels, or just men, command you to suffer for a single moment. Therefore it is your solemn and imperative duty to use every means, both moral, intellectual, and physical, that promise success .... Brethren, arise, arise! Strike for your lives and liberties.... Let your motto be resistance, resistance, resistance!

One should never put on one's best trousers to go out to fight for freedom.

I live in the United States, but I do not know exactly where. My address is wherever there is a fight against oppression. My address is like my shoes; it travels with me. I abide where there is a fight against wrong.

Rights did not just fall out of the sky. They were the result of struggle.

It is almost never when a state of things is the most detestable that it is smashed, but when, beginning to improve, it permits men to breathe, to reflect, to communicate their thoughts with each other, and to gauge by what they already have the extent of their rights and their grievances. The weight, although less heavy, seems then all the more unbearable.

It is repression that creates the revolutionary spirit of freedom.