Top 100 Woodrow Wilson Quotes
#1. I do not want to live under a philanthropy. I do not want to be taken care of by the government ... We do not want a benevolent government. We want a free and a just government.
Woodrow Wilson
#2. My dream of politics all my life has been that it is the common business, that it is something we owe to each other to understand and discuss with absolute frankness.
Woodrow Wilson
#3. So far as religion is concerned, argument is adjourned.
Woodrow Wilson
#4. The sum of the whole matter is this - our civilization cannot survive materially unless it be redeemed spiritually.
Woodrow Wilson
#5. All the extraordinary men I have known were extraordinary in their own estimation.
Woodrow Wilson
#6. No society is renewed from the top and every society is renewed from the bottom.
Woodrow Wilson
#7. I must beg you to indulge me in the matter of hyphens ... You will find that I have marked out a great many in the proofs. We arein danger of Germanizing our printing by using them so much, and I have a very decided preference in the matter.
Woodrow Wilson
#8. No man that does not see visions will ever realize any high hope or undertake any high enterprise.
Woodrow Wilson
#9. There is no higher religion than human service. To work for the common good is the greatest creed.
Woodrow Wilson
#10. The literary gift is a very dangerous gift to possess if you are not telling the truth, and I would a great deal rather, for my part, have a man stumble in his speech than to feel he was so exceedingly smooth that he had better be watched both day and night.
Woodrow Wilson
#11. The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation - until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.
Woodrow Wilson
#12. It is ... particularly true of constitutional government that its atmosphere is opinion ... It does not remain fixed in any unchanging form, but grows with the growth and is altered with the change of the nation's needs and purposes.
Woodrow Wilson
#13. By 'radical,' I understand one who goes too far; by 'conservative', one who does not go far enough; by 'reactionary', one who won't go at all.
Woodrow Wilson
#14. It would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.
Woodrow Wilson
#15. If you would be a leader of men you must lead your own generation, not the next. Your playing must be good now, while the play ison the boards and the audience in the seats ... It will not get you the repute of a good actor to have excellencies discovered in you afterwards.
Woodrow Wilson
#16. High society is for those who have stopped working and no longer have anything important to do.
Woodrow Wilson
#17. The most conservative persons I ever met are college undergraduates.
Woodrow Wilson
#18. War isn't declared in the name of God; it is a human affair entirely.
Woodrow Wilson
#19. There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight.
Woodrow Wilson
#20. Whate'er my doom;
It cannot be unhappy: God hath given me
The boon of resignation.
Woodrow Wilson
#21. I used to be a lawyer, but now I am a reformed character.
Woodrow Wilson
#22. Your enlightenment depends on the company you keep. You do not know the world until you know the men who have possessed it and tried its wares before you were ever given your brief run upon it.
Woodrow Wilson
#23. Tolerance is an admirable intellectual gift; but it is of little worth in politics.
Woodrow Wilson
#24. The nation's honor is dearer than the nation's comfort.
Woodrow Wilson
#25. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts
Woodrow Wilson
#26. The man who has no vision will undertake no great enterprise.
Woodrow Wilson
#27. The only use of an obstacle is to be overcome. All that an obstacle does with brave men is, not to frighten them, but to challenge them.
Woodrow Wilson
#28. The facts of the case will always have the better of [an] argument.
Woodrow Wilson
#29. Leadership does not always wear the harness of compromise.
Woodrow Wilson
#30. You cannot, in human experience, rush into the light. You have to go through the twilight into the broadening day before the noon comes and the full sun is upon the landscape.
Woodrow Wilson
#31. Benevolence does not consist in those who are prosperous pitying and helping those who are not. It consists in fellow feeling that puts you upon actually the same level with the fellow who suffers.
Woodrow Wilson
#32. In public affairs, stupidity is more dangerous than knavery, because it is harder to fight.
Woodrow Wilson
#33. There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized peace.
Woodrow Wilson
#34. Friendship is the only cement that will ever hold the world together.
Woodrow Wilson
#35. Your real statesman is first of all, and chief of all, a great human being, with an eye for all the great fields on which men likehimself struggle, with unflagging, pathetic hope, toward better things ... He is a guide, a counselor, a mentor, a servant, a friend of mankind.
Woodrow Wilson
#36. The highest and best form of efficiency is the spontaneous cooperation of a free people.
Woodrow Wilson
#37. Big business is not dangerous because it is big, but because its bigness is an unwholesome inflation created by privileges and exemptions which it ought not to enjoy.
Woodrow Wilson
#38. When men take up arms to set other men free, there is something sacred and holy in the warfare.
Woodrow Wilson
#39. When I think of the flag ... I see alternate strips of parchment upon which are written the rights of liberty and justice, and stripes of blood to vindicate those rights, and then, in the corner, a prediction of the blue serene into which every nation may swim which stands for these great things.
Woodrow Wilson
#40. I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty.
Woodrow Wilson
#41. What is the use of voting? We know that the machines of both parties are subsidized by the same persons, and therefore it is useless to turn in either direction.
Woodrow Wilson
#42. What every man seeks is satisfaction. He deceives himself so long as he imagines it to lie in self-indulgence.
Woodrow Wilson
#43. Hunger does not breed reform; it breeds madness and all the distemper's that make an ordered life impossible.
Woodrow Wilson
#45. My hope is ... that we may recover ... something of a renewal of that vision of the law with which men may be supposed to have started out with in the old days of the oracles, who communed with the intimations of divinity.
Woodrow Wilson
#46. You cannot be friends upon any other terms than upon the terms of equality.
Woodrow Wilson
#47. A conservative is a man who sits and thinks, mostly sits.
Woodrow Wilson
#48. The allied nations with the fullest concurrence of our government and people are agreed that in Palestine shall be laid the foundations of a Jewish Commonwealth.
Woodrow Wilson
#49. You devour a book meant to be read, not because you would fill yourself or have an anxious care to be nourished, but because it contains such stuff
Woodrow Wilson
#50. Every great man of business has got somewhere a touch of the idealist in him.
Woodrow Wilson
#52. If you think too much about being re-elected, it is very difficult to be worth re-electing.
Woodrow Wilson
#53. We live in an age disturbed, confused, bewildered, afraid of its own forces, in search not merely of its road but even of its direction
Woodrow Wilson
#54. They do not need our praise. They do not need that our admiration should sustain them. There is no immortality that is safer than theirs. We come not for their sakes but for our own, in order that we may drink at the same springs of inspiration from which they themselves drank.
Woodrow Wilson
#55. Whatever may be said against the chewing of tobacco, this at least can be said of it, that it gives a man time to think between sentences.
Woodrow Wilson
#56. The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation.
Woodrow Wilson
#57. Such a mind we must desire to see in a woman,
a mind that stirs without irritating you, that arouses but does not belabour, amuses and yet subtly instructs.
Woodrow Wilson
#58. When the representatives of "Big Business" think of the people, they do not include themselves.
Woodrow Wilson
#59. The ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people.
Woodrow Wilson
#60. If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.
Woodrow Wilson
#61. Neutrality is a negative word. It does not express what America ought to feel. We are not trying to keep out of trouble; we are trying to preserve the foundations on which peace may be rebuilt.
Woodrow Wilson
#64. If I cannot retain my moral influence over a man except by occasionally knocking him down, if that is the only basis upon which he will respect me, then for the sake of his soul I have got occasionally to knock him down.
Woodrow Wilson
#65. Where the great force lies, there must be the sanction of peace.
Woodrow Wilson
#66. The flag is a flag of liberty of opinion as well as of political liberty.
Woodrow Wilson
#67. [We are] no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men.
Woodrow Wilson
#68. [o]f course like every other man of intelligence and education I do believe in organic evolution. It surprises me that at this late date such questions should be raised.
Woodrow Wilson
#69. Government ought to be all outside and no inside ... Everybody knows that corruption thrives in secret places, and avoids public places, and we believe it a fair presumption that secrecy means impropriety.
Woodrow Wilson
#70. Let it be your pride to show all men everywhere not only what good soldiers you are, but also what good men you are.
Woodrow Wilson
#71. We cannot be separated in interest or divided in purpose. We stand together until the end.
Woodrow Wilson
#72. When you have read the Bible, you will know it is the word of God, because you will have found it the key to your own heart, your own happiness and your own duty.
Woodrow Wilson
#73. The presidential office is not a rosewater affair. This is an office in which a man must put on his war paint.
Woodrow Wilson
#74. The question of armaments, whether on land or sea, is the most immediately and intensely practical question connected with the future fortunes of nations and of mankind.
Woodrow Wilson
#75. If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it; what we have to determine now is whether we are big enough, whether we are men enough, whether we are free enough, to take possession again of the government which is our own.
Woodrow Wilson
#77. Government is merely an attempt to express the conscience of everybody, the average conscience of the nation, in the rules that everybody is commanded to obey. That is all it is.
Woodrow Wilson
#78. The firm basis of government is justice, not pity.
Woodrow Wilson
#80. Has justice ever grown in the soil of absolute power? Has not justice always come from the ... heart and spirit of men who resist power?
Woodrow Wilson
#81. I would rather fail in a cause that would ultimately succeed, than succeed in a cause that would ultimately fail.
Woodrow Wilson
#82. The success of a party means little more than that the Nation is using the party for a large and definite purpose. It seeks to use and interpret a change in its own plans and point of view.
Woodrow Wilson
#83. The Civil War created in this country what had never existed before - a national consciousness. It was not the salvation of the Union; it was the rebirth of the Union.
Woodrow Wilson
#84. One of the proofs of the divinity of our gospel is the preaching it has survived.
Woodrow Wilson
#85. We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.
Woodrow Wilson
#86. It has become a people's war, and peoples of all sorts and races, of every degree of power and variety of fortune, are involved inits sweeping processes of change and settlement.
Woodrow Wilson
#87. I have sometimes heard men say politics must have nothing to do with business, and I have often wished that business had nothing to do with politics.
Woodrow Wilson
#88. I am not one of those who have the least anxiety about the triumph of the principles I have stood for. I have seen fools resist Providence before, and I have seen their destruction, as will come upon these again, utter destruction and contempt. That we shall prevail is as sure as that God reigns.
Woodrow Wilson
#89. You are not here merely to making a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement.
Woodrow Wilson
#90. There are blessed intervals when I forget by one means or another that I am President of the United States.
Woodrow Wilson
#91. The cure for bad politics is the same as the cure for tuberculosis. It is living in the open.
Woodrow Wilson
#92. It is not men that interest or disturb me primarily; it is ideas. Ideas live; men die.
Woodrow Wilson
#93. Nothing was ever done so systematically as nothing is being done now.
Woodrow Wilson
#94. We can have no sympathy with those who seek the power of government to advance their own personal interests or ambitions.
Woodrow Wilson
#95. Uncompromising thought is the luxury of the closeted recluse.
Woodrow Wilson
#96. Liberty has never come from Government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.
Woodrow Wilson
#97. The difference between a strong man and a weak one is that the former does not give up after a defeat.
Woodrow Wilson
#98. If you lose your wealth, you have lost nothing; if you lose your health, you have lost something; but if you lose your character, you have lost everything.
Woodrow Wilson
#99. There is here a great melting pot in which we must compound a precious metal. That metal is the metal of nationality.
Woodrow Wilson
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