Woodrow Wilson Quotes

A conservative is a man who just sits and thinks, mostly sits.

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

The awakening of the people of China to the possibilities under free government is the most significant, if not the most momentous, event of our generation.

We cannot be separated in interest or divided in purpose. We stand together until the end.

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

There is no indispensable man. The government will not collapse and go to pieces if any one of the gentlemen who are seeking to be entrusted with its guidance should be left at home.

Let it be your pride to show all men everywhere not only what good soldiers you are, but also what good men you are.

No man can be just who is not free.

This book [the Bible] speaks both the voice of God and the voice of humanity, for there is told in it the most convincing of human experience that has ever been written...and those who heed that story will know their strength and happiness and success are all summed up in the exhortation, "Fear God and keep His commandments."

We are expected to put the utmost energy, of every power that we have, into the service of our fellow men, never sparing ourselves, not condescending to think of what is going to happen to ourselves, but ready, if need be, to go to the utter length of self-sacrifice.

The flag is a flag of liberty of opinion as well as of political liberty.

All the extraordinary men I have ever known were chiefly extraordinary in their own estimation.

I want to re-echo my hope that we may all work together for a great peace as distinguished from a mean peace.

There is little for the great part of the history of the world except the bitter tears of pity and the hot tears of wrath.

They lived long that have lived well.

Today's greatest labor-saving device is tomorrow.

The flag is the embodiment, not of sentiment, but of history.

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.

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

We grow by our dreams.

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

High society is for those who have stopped working and no longer have anything important to do.

Washington has seldom seen so numerous, so industrious or so insidious a lobby. There is every evidence that money without limit is being spent to sustain this lobby.... I know that in this I am speaking for the members of the two houses, who would rejoice as much as I would to be released from this unbearable situation.

We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers.

I have come slowly into possession of such powers as I have. I receive the opinions of my day. I do not conceive them. But I receive them into a vivid mind.

Unless justice be done to others it will not be done to us.

Any man that resists the present tides that run in the world, will find himself thrown upon a shore so high and barren that it will seem he has been separated from his human kind forever.

...I do not want a government that will take care of me, I want a government that will make other men take their hands off me so I can take care of myself.

Generally young men are regarded as radicals. This is a popular misconception. The most conservative persons I ever met are college undergraduates. The radicals are the men past middle life.

An evident principleis the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak.

We are in the presence of a new organization of society. Our life has broken away from the past.

What is at the heart of all national problems? It is that we have seen the hand of material interest sometimes about to close upon our dearest rights and possessions.

Self-determination is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative principle of action, which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril.

Freedom exists only where the people take care of the government.

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

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

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

The things that the flag stands for were created by the experiences of a great people. Everything that it stands for was written by their lives. The flag is the embodiment, not of sentiment, but of history.

The fewer the desires, the more peace.

The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation.

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.

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.

Great statesmen seem to direct and rule by a sort of power to put themselves in the place of the nation over which they are set, and may thus be said to possess the souls of poets at the same time they display the coarser sense and the more vulgar sagacity of practical men of business.

There are blessed intervals when I forget by one means or another that I am President of the United States.

The world must be made safe for democracy.

There is a very holy and a very terrible isolation for the conscience of every man who seeks to read the destiny in affairs for others as well as for himself, for a nation as well as for individuals. That privacy no man can intrude upon. That lonely search of the spirit for the right perhaps no man can assist.

We forget that there is much more patriotism in having the audacity to differ from the majority than in running before the crowd; we forget that in the resistance of the minority some of the biggest things in our own history have been accomplished, and the man who looks on the Stars and Stripes and doesn't hold a right to say nay to his neighbor, even if the neighbor is of the larger party, has forgotten the history of his country.

If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if an hour, I am ready now.