Woodrow Wilson Quotes

We have not given science too big a place in our education, but we have made a perilous mistake in giving it too great a preponderance in method in every other branch of study.

Freedom exists only where people take care of the government.

I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world - 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 duress of a small group of dominant men.

America is not anything if it consists of each of us. It is something only if it consists of all of us.

America was born to exemplify that devotion to the elements of righteousness which are derived from the revelations of the Holy Scripture.

He is not a true man of the world who knows only the present fashions of it.

It would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.

I believe very profoundly in an over-ruling Providence, and I do not fear that any real plans can be thrown off the track. It maynot be intended that I shall be President
but that would not break my heart.

Golf is a game in which one endeavors to control a ball with implements ill adapted for the purpose.

The world has a habit of going on.

No man can be just who is not free.

The masters of the government of the United States are the combined capitalists and manufacturers of the United States.

A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men who, even if their action be honest and intended for the public interest, are necessarily concentrated upon the great undertakings in which their own money is involved and who necessarily, by very reason of their own limitations, chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom.

We can afford to exercise the self-restraint of a really great nation which realizes its own strength and scorns to misuse it.

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.

The example of America must be the example not merely of peace because it will not fight, but of peace because peace is the healing and elevating influence of the world, and strife is not. There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.

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.

Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at.

Statesmen have to bend to the collective will of their peoples or be broken.

The man swimming against the stream knows the strenth of it.

The law that will work is merely the summing up in legislative form of the moral judgment that the community has already reached.

To fight, you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fibre of national life ...

War is only a sort of dramatic representation, a sort of dramatic symbol of a thousand forms of duty. I fancy that it is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shooting at you.

Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?

Never murder a man when he's busy committing suicide.

Only peace between equals can last.

Remember that God ordained that I should be the next president of the United States. Neither you nor any other mortal or mortals could have prevented this.

Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.

There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight.

But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts

There will be no greater burden on our generation than to organize the forces of liberty in our time in order to make our quest ofa new freedom for America.

Government, in it's last analysis, is organized force.

We shall not, I believe, be obliged to alter our policy of watchful waiting.

Fear God and you need not fear anyone else.

The flag of the United States has not been created by rhetorical sentences in declarations of independence and in bills of rights. It has been created by the experience of a great people, and nothing is written upon it that has not been written by their life. It is the embodiment, not of a sentiment, but of a history ...

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.

I would rather lose in a cause that will some day win, than win in a cause that will some day lose!

The roll of honor consists of the names of meant who have squared their conduct by ideals of duty.

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

If Germany won it would change the course of our civilization and make the United States a military nation [and] it would check his policy for a better international ethical code

Some Americans need hyphens in their names, because only part of them has come over; but when the whole man has come over, heart and thought and all, the hyphen drops of its own weight out of his name.

The sum of the whole matter is this - our civilization cannot survive materially unless it be redeemed spiritually.

Friendship is the only cement that will ever hold the world together.

How is the schoolmaster, the nation, to know which boy needs the whipping?

There is a price which is too great to pay for peace, and that price can be put in one word. One cannot pay the price of self-respect.

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.

There is nothing that succeeds in life like boldness, provided you believe you are on the right side.

I not only use all the brains that I have, but all I can borrow.

Things get very lonely in Washington sometimes. The real voice of the great people of America sometimes sounds faint and distant in that strange city. You hear politics until you wish that both parties were smothered in their own gas.

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.

The interesting and inspiring thing about America is that she asks nothing for herself except what she has a right to ask for humanity itself.

The way to stop financial joyriding is to arrest the chauffeur, not the automobile.

This is history written in lightning.

It does not become America that within her borders, where every man is free to follow the dictates of his conscience, men should raise the cry of church against church. To do that is to strike at the very spirit and heart of America.

My own ideals for the university are those of a genuine democracy and serious scholarship. These two, indeed, seem to go together.

The beauty of a democracy is that you never can tell when a youngster is born what he is going to do with himself, and that no matter how humbly he is born, no matter where he is born, no matter what circumstances hamper him at the outset, he has got a chance to master the minds and lead the imaginations of the whole country.

Some of us let our dreams die, but others nourish and protect them, nurse them through bad days 'till they bring them to sunshine and light.

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.

The light that shined upon the summit now seems almost to shine at our feet.

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.

America was established not to create wealth but to realize a vision, to realize an ideal - to discover and maintain liberty among men.

You have the greatest soul, the noblest nature, the sweetest, most loving heart I have ever known, and my love, my reverence, my admiration for you, you have increased in one evening as I should have thought only a lifetime of intimate, loving association could have increased them. You are more wonderful and lovely in my eyes than you ever were before; and my pride and joy and gratitude that you should love me with such a perfect love are beyond all expression, except in some great poem which I cannot write.

Understanding is the soil in which grow all the fruits of friendship.

Responsibility is proportionate to opportunity.

If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it.

They [the children] live in a world of delightful imagination; they pursue persons and objects that never existed; they make an Argosy laden with gold out of a floating butterfly,
and these stupid [grown-up people] try to translate these things into uninteresting facts.

Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end, and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.

At every crisis in one's life, it is absolute salvation to have some sympathetic friend to whom you can think aloud without restraint or misgiving.

Have you thought of the sufferings of Armenia? You poured out your money to help succor the Armenians after they suffered; now set your strength so that they shall never suffer again.

I have received delegations of working men who come, apparently speaking of the utmost sincerity, have declared that they would regard it as a genuine hardship to be deprived of their beer.

Some of the greatest and most lasting effects of genuine oratory have gone forth from secluded lecture desks into the hearts of quiet groups of students.

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.

Princeton is no longer a thing for Princeton men to please themselves with. Princeton is a thing with which Princeton men must satisfy the country.

This little world, this little state, this little commonwealth of our own ...

It is easier to move a cemetery than to change a curriculum.

The spirit of [William] Penn will not be stayed. You cannot set limits to such knightly adventurers. After their own day is gone their spirits stalk the world, carrying inspiration everywhere that they go and reminding men of the lineage, the fine lineage, of those who have sought justice and right.

We [Americans] have a great ardor for gain; but we have a deep passion for the rights of man.

Settlements may be temporary, but the action of the nations in the interest of peace and justice must be permanent. We can set up permanent processes. We may not be able to set up permanent decisions.

It's harder for a leader to be born in a palace than to be born in a cabin.

To think that I, the son ofthe manse, should be able to help restore the Holy Land to its people.

Surely a man has come to himself only when he has found the best that is in him, and has satisfied his heart with the highest achievement he is fit for.

It recognizes no morality but a sham morality meant for deceit, no honor even among thieves and of a thievish sort, no force but physical force, no intellectual power but cunning, no disgrace but failure, no crime but stupidity.

Movies are like writing history with lightning.

A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying to do. We are trying to do a futile thing if we do not know where we came from or what we have been about.

Liberty is its own reward.

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.

Today, supremely, it behooves us to remember that a nation shall be saved by the power that sleeps in its own bosom; or by none; shall be renewed in hope, in confidence, in strength by waters welling up from its own sweet, perennial springs. Not from above; not by patronage of its aristocrats. The flower does not bear the root, but the root the flower.

To do things today exactly the way you did them yesterday saves thinking.

We can have no sympathy with those who seek the power of government to advance their own personal interests or ambitions.

A radical is one of whom people say 'He goes too far.' A conservative, on the other hand, is one who 'doesn't go far enough.' Then there is the reactionary, 'one who doesn't go at all.' All these terms are more or less objectionable, wherefore we have

There is here a great melting pot in which we must compound a precious metal. That metal is the metal of nationality.

A politician, a man engaged in party contests, must be an opportunist. Let us give up saying that word as if it contained a slur. If you want to win in party action, I take it for granted that you want to lure the majority to your side. I never heard of any man in his senses who was fishing for a minority.

I am not sure that it is of the first importance that you should be happy. Many an unhappy man has been of deep service to himself and to the world.

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.

America cannot be an ostrich with its head in the sand.

The use of a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible. ["The Power of Christian Young Men", Address at the Young Men's Christian Association's Celebration, Pittsburgh, October 24, 1914]

Tell me what is right and I will fight for it.

I lived a dream life (almost too exclusively, perhaps) when I was a lad and even now my thought goes back for refreshment to thosedays when all the world seemed to be a place of heroic adventure in which one's heart must keep its own counsel.

If you think too much about being re-elected, it is very difficult to be worth re-electing.

I have no happy fairyland vision that she can win.