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.

The greatest embarrassment of my political career has been that active duties seem to deprive me of time for careful investigation. I seem almost obliged to form conclusions from impressions instead of from study.... I wish that I had more knowledge, more thorough acquaintance, with the matters involved.

Democracy is not so much a form of government as a set of principles.

One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty counsels. The thing to do is to supply light and not heat.

This was not after all a conventional war, a struggle between equally predacious powers; it was a war to end all wars.

Our object now, as then, is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power, and to set up among the really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth insure the observance of those principles.

...We are intensely proud of their noble record and are glad to have had the whole world see how irresistible they are in their might when a cause which America holds dear is at stake. The whole nation has reason to be proud of them.