Sourced

• Revolutions are not made; they come. A revolution is as natural a growth as an oak. It comes out of the past. Its foundations are laid far back.
  • Speech (January 8, 1852)

• The best use of laws is to teach men to trample bad laws under their feet.
  • Speech (April 12, 1852)

• Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
  • Speech (January 28, 1852) (often misappropriated to Thomas Jefferson)

• What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action.
  • Speech (December 21, 1855)

• One on God's side is a majority.
  • Lecture in Brooklyn (November 1, 1859)

• Every man meets his Waterloo at last.
  • Lecture in Brooklyn (November 1, 1859)

• Whether in chains or in laurels, Liberty knows nothing but victories.
  • Lecture in Brooklyn (November 1, 1859)

• Truth is one forever absolute, but opinion is truth filtered through the moods, the blood, the disposition of the spectator.
  • Idols (October 4, 1859)

• Difference of religion breeds more quarrels than difference of politics.
  • Speech (November 7, 1860)

• Revolutions never go backward.
  • Speech (February 17, 1861)

• Aristocracy is always cruel.
  • Address on Toussaint L'Ouverture (1861)

• 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.
  • Lecture: The Lost Arts, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Unsourced

• Christianity is a battle not a dream.

• Governments exist to protect the rights of minorities. The loved and the rich need no protection: they have many friends and few enemies.

• If you want to be an orator, first get your great cause.

• Insurrection of thought always precedes insurrection of arms.

• It is only liquid currents of thought that move men and the world.

• Many know how to flatter, few know how to praise.

• Politics is but the common pulse-beat, of which revolution is the fever-spasm.

• Seldom ever was any knowledge given to keep, but to impart; the grace of this rich jewel is lost in concealment.

• The best education in the world is that got by struggling to get a living.

• The heart is the best reflective thinker.

• To be as good as our fathers we must be better, imitation is not discipleship.

• 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.

• Today it is not big business that we have to fear. It is big government.

• 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.

• We live under a government of men and morning newspapers.

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

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

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

• "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.'" Mrs. Ware in Chapter II of the novel The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic, 1896.