Woodrow Wilson Quotes

It is imperative that we should not only master them, but also act upon them, and act very definitely.

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

If young gentlemen get from their years in college only manliness, esprit de corps, a release of their social gifts, a training ingive and take, a catholic taste in men and the standards of true sportsmen, they have gained much but they have not gained what a college should give them. It should give them insight into the things of the mind and the spiritthe consciousness of having taken on them the vows of true enlightenment and of having undergone the discipline, never to be shaken off, of those who seek wisdom in candor, with faithful labor and travail of spirit.

Music says nothing to the reason: it is a kind of closely structured nonsense.

Wilson was once asked how long it took him to write a speech. He answered, 'That depends. If I am to speak 10 minutes, I need a week for preparation. If 15 minutes, 3 days. If half hour, two days. If an hour, I am ready now.'

The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name.... We must be impartial in thought as well as in actiona nationthat neither sits in judgment upon others nor is disturbed in her own counsels and which keeps herself fit and free to do what is honest and disinterested and truly serviceable for the peace of the world.

Energy in a nation is like sap in a tree; it rises from bottom up.

The firm basis of government is justice, not pity.

In fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same. They both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members. Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals. Limits of wisdom and convenience to the public control there may be: limits of principle there are, upon strict analysis, none.

A right is worth fighting for only when it can be put into operation.

Prosperity is necessarily the first theme of a political campaign.

Men grow by having responsibility laid upon them.

The ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people.

My best training came from my father.

When men take up arms to set other men free, there is something sacred and holy in the warfare.

Nothing was ever done so systematically as nothing is being done now.

There are times when words seem empty and only actions seem great. Such a time has come, and in the Providence of God America will once more have an opportunity to show the world that she was born to save mankind.

I have received delegations of working men who, apparently speaking with the utmost sincerity, have declared that they would regard it as a genuine hardship if they were deprived of their beer, for example.

I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it.

The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.

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

We came to America, either ourselves or in the persons of our ancestors, to better the ideals of men, to make them see finer things than they had seen before, to get rid of the things that divide and to make sure of the things that unite.

Politics is a war of causes; a joust of principles. Government is too serious a matter to admit of meaningless courtesies.

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.

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.

As a matter of fact and experience, the more power is divided the more irresponsible it becomes.

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.

Sciencehas won for us a great liberty in the physical world, a liberty from superstitious fear and from disease, a freedom touse nature as a familiar servant; but it has not freed us from ourselves.

The city of Washington is in some respects self-contained, and it is easy there to forget what the rest of the United States is thinking about. I count it a fortunate circumstance that almost all the windows of the White House and its offices open upon unoccupied spaces that stretch to the banks of the Potomacand that as I sit there I can constantly forget Washington and remember the United States.

The natural man inevitably rebels against mathematics, a mild form of torture that could only be learned by painful processes of drill.

I am sorry for men who do not read the Bible every day. I wonder why they deprive themselves of the strength and pleasure.

We didn't have another choice but to do what we did, if we wanted to be accepted, because we weren't counted as human beings.

When the representatives of "Big Business" think of the people, they do not include themselves.

I have always been among those who believed that the greatest freedom of speech was the greatest safety, because if a man is a fool, the best thing to do is to encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking.

The Government of the United States would be constrained to hold the Imperial German government to a strict accountability for such acts of their naval authorities.

[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.

The presidential office is not a rosewater affair. This is an office in which a man must put on his war paint.

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

I believe in human liberty as I believe in the wine of life. There is no salvation for men in the pitiful condescension of industrial masters. Guardians have no place in a land of freemen.

There is no more subtle dissolvent of morals than sentimentality.

If you wish your children to be Christians you must really take the trouble to be Christian yourselves. Those are the only terms upon which the home will work the gracious miracle.

That a peasant may become king does not render the kingdom democratic.

Progressiveness means not standing still when everything else is moving.

Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. 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.

That is Gladstone, the greatest statesman that ever lived. I intend to be a statesman, too.

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.

We have beaten the living, but we cannot fight the dead.

But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts--for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own Governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.