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 WilsonLiving political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must develop. All that progressives ask or desire is permission-in an era when 'development,' 'evolution,' is the scientific word-to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.
Woodrow WilsonThe men who act stand nearer to the mass of man than the men who write; and it is in their hands that new thought gets its translation into the crude language of deeds.
Woodrow WilsonPeople will endure their tyrants for years, but they tear their deliverers to pieces if a millennium is not created immediately.
Woodrow WilsonThere must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized peace.
Woodrow WilsonThey 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 WilsonThe westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickenswith the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.
Woodrow WilsonThere is no cause half so sacred as the cause of the people. There is no idea so uplifting as the idea of the service of humanity.
Woodrow WilsonThe commands of democracy are as imperative as its privileges and opportunities are wide and generous. Its compulsion is upon us.
Woodrow WilsonI 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 WilsonThings 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.
Woodrow WilsonOne cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty counsels. The thing to do is to supply light and not heat.
Woodrow WilsonI am a most unhappy man. I accidentally ruined my country. A great industrial nation is now controlled by its system of credit. Our government is no longer based on the freedom of opinion, nor on the conviction and the majority decision, it is now a government which is subjected to the conviction and the compulsion of a small group of dominant men.
Woodrow WilsonThe Americans who went to Europe to die are a unique breed.... (They) crossed the seas to a foreign land to fight for a cause which they did not pretend was peculiarly their own, which they knew was the cause of humanity and mankind. These Americans gave the greatest of all gifts, the gift of life and the gift of spirit.
Woodrow WilsonA man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American. And the man who goes among you to trade upon your nationality is no worthy son to live under the Stars and Stripes.
Woodrow WilsonThe cure for bad politics is the same as the cure for tuberculosis. It is living in the open.
Woodrow WilsonThe trouble with the theory [of limited and divided government] is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. This is where the living and breathing constitution comes from. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life.
Woodrow WilsonThe 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 WilsonThere 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.
Woodrow WilsonSome 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.
Woodrow WilsonAmerica is not anything if it consists of each of us. It is something only if it consists of all of us...
Woodrow WilsonHunger does not breed reform; it breeds madness and all the distemper's that make an ordered life impossible.
Woodrow WilsonFrom the dim morning hours of history when the father was king and priest down to this modern time of history's high noon when nations stand forth full grown and self-governed, the law of coherence and continuity in political development has suffered no serious breach.
Woodrow WilsonI would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it.
Woodrow WilsonConservatism is the policy of make no change and consult your grandmother when in doubt.
Woodrow WilsonI could see now that a literary education did not fit one for the popular novelist's trade.Once you had started using words like flavicomous or acroamatic, because you liked the sound of them, you were lost.
Woodrow WilsonI am not willing to be drawn further into the toils. I cannot accede to the acceptance of gifts upon terms which take the educational policy of the university out of the hands of the Trustees and Faculty and permit it to be determined by those who give money.
Woodrow WilsonIf 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 WilsonProperty as compared with humanity, as compared with the red blood in the American people, must take second place, not first place.
Woodrow WilsonWe 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 WilsonI am all kinds of a democrat, so far as I can discover but the root of the whole business is this, that I believe in the patriotism and energy and initiative of the average man.
Woodrow WilsonI have long enjoyed the friendship and companionship of Republicans because I am by instinct a teacher, and I would like to teach them something.
Woodrow WilsonIt 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.
Woodrow Wilson