1850s

• 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 before the Massachusetts Antislavery Society (28 January 1852), published in Speeches, Letters and Lectures by Wendell Phillips (1884), p. 36

• 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.
  • Anti-Slavery Speech (January 1852) Published in The Works of Wendell Phillips, Street & Smith (1902), p. 22-23

• The best use of laws is to teach men to trample bad laws under their feet.
  • Speech at the Melodeon, on the first anniversary of the rendition of Thomas Sims (12 April 12 1852), published in Speeches, Letters and Lectures by Wendell Phillips (1884), p. 91.

• Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty — power is ever stealing from the many to the few…. The hand entrusted with power becomes … the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continual oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot: only by unintermitted Agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.
  • Speech in Boston, Massachusetts (28 January 1852), Speeches Before the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (1853), p. 13. The memorable and oft-quoted phrase, "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty," was not in quotation marks in the printed edition of this speech. The Home Book of Quotations, ed. Burton Stevenson, 9th ed., p. 1106 (1964), notes that "It has been said that Mr. Phillips was quoting Thomas Jefferson, but in a letter dated 14 April, 1879, Mr. Phillips wrote: '"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" has been attributed to Jefferson, but no one has yet found it in his works or elsewhere.' It has also been attributed to Patrick Henry."

• What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action.
  • Speech at the dinner of the Pilgrim Society (21 December 1855), published in Speeches, Letters and Lectures by Wendell Phillips (1884), p. 229

• Truth is one forever, absolute; but opinion is truth filtered through the moods, the blood, the disposition, of the spectator.
  • Fraternity lecture delivered in Boston (4 October 1859), published in Speeches, Letters and Lectures by Wendell Phillips (1884), p. 245

1860s

• Difference of religion breeds more quarrels than difference of politics.
  • Speech (7 November 1860).^{[specific citation needed]}

• I think the first duty of society is justice.
  • Disunion (21 January 1861).^{[specific citation needed]}

• Revolutions never go backward.
  • Address delivered before the Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society in Music Hall, Boston, February 17, 1861, published in Speeches, Letters and Lectures by Wendell Phillips (1884), p. 380.

1870s

He who stifles free discussion, secretly doubts whether what he professes to believe is really true.

• He who stifles free discussion, secretly doubts whether what he professes to believe is really true.
  • Oration delivered at Daniel O'Connell celebration, Boston (6 August 1870), published in Wendell Phillips: The Agitator (1890) by William Carlos Martyn, p. 563

1880s