Woodrow Wilson Quotes

The literary gift is a very dangerous gift to possess if you are not telling the truth, and I would a great deal rather, for my part, have a man stumble in his speech than to feel he was so exceedingly smooth that he had better be watched both day and night.

So far as the colleges go, the side-shows have swallowed up the circus, and we don't know what is going on in the main tent: and I don't want to continue as ringmaster under those conditions.

The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make.

...it would be a mistake...to ascribe to Roman legal conceptions an undivided sway over the development of law and institutions during the Middle Ages... The Laws of Moses as well as the laws of Rome contributed suggestions and impulse to the men and institutions which were to prepare the modern world; and if we could have but eyes to see... we should readily discover how very much besides religion we owe to the Jew.

The man who has no vision will undertake no great enterprise.

If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own 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.

I have the feeling that he would rather see a good cause fail than succeed if he were not the head of it.

All things come to him who waits - provided he knows what he is waiting for.

The history of liberty is a history of resistance.

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

Let me... remind you that it is only by working with an energy which is almost superhuman and which looks to uninterested spectators like insanity that we can accomplish anything worth the achievement. Work is the keystone of a perfect life. Work and trust in God.

Once lead this people into war, and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight, you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fiber of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street.

No nation is fit to sit in judgement upon any other nation.

The whole purpose of democracy is that we may hold counsel with one another, so as not to depend upon the understanding of one man.

There is no higher religion than human service. To work for the common good is the greatest creed.

My urgent advice to you would be, not only always to think first of America, but always, also, to think first of humanity. You do not love humanity if you seek to divide humanity into jealous camps. Humanity can be welded together only by love, by sympathy, by justice, not by jealousy and hatred. I am sorry for the man who seeks to make personal capital out of the passions of his fellowmen. He has lost touch with the ideal of America. For America was created to unit mankind.

I am not one of those who have the least anxiety about the triumph of the principles I have stood for. I have seen fools resist Providence before, and I have seen their destruction, as will come upon these again, utter destruction and contempt. That we shall prevail is as sure as that God reigns.

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

When you have read the Bible, you will know it is the word of God, because you will have found it the key to your own heart, your own happiness and your own duty.

We want the spirit of America to be efficient; we want American character to be efficient; we want American character to display itself in what I may, perhaps, be allowed to call spiritual efficiency - clear disinterested thinking and fearless action

I had rather have everybody on my side than be armed to the teeth.

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

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.

Interest does not tie nations together; it sometimes separates them. But sympathy and understanding does unite them.

America is not a mere body of traders; it is a body of free men. Our greatness is built upon our freedom - is moral, not material. We have a great ardor for gain; but we have a deep passion for the rights of man.

No one who has read official documents needs to be told how easy it is to conceal the essential truth under the apparently candid and all- disclosing phrases of a voluminous and particularizing report.

No student knows his subject: the most he knows is where and how to find out the things he does not know

Tolerance is an admirable intellectual gift; but it is of little worth in politics.

We are not here merely to make a living. We are here to enrich the world.

A nation is as great, and only as great, as her rank and file.

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

We are citizens of the world. The tragedy of our times is that we do not know this.

A man has deprived himself of the best there is in the world who has deprived himself of this.

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.

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.

A man is not as big as his belief in himself; he is as big as the number of persons who believe in him.

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

I have had the accomplishment of something like this at heart ever since I was a boy.... So I feel tonight like the man who is lodging happily in the inn which lies half way along the journey and that in time, with a fresh impulse, we shall go the rest of the journey and sleep at the journey's end like men with a quiet conscience.

To be free is not necessarily to be wise. Wisdom comes with counsel, with the frank and free conference of untrammeled men united in the common interest.

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

Your enlightenment depends on the company you keep. You do not know the world until you know the men who have possessed it and tried its wares before you were ever given your brief run upon it.

There is something better, if possible, that a man can give than his life. That is his living spirit to a service that is not easy, to resist counsels that are hard to resist, to stand against purposes that are difficult to stand against.

No task, rightly done, is truly private. It is part of the world s work.

The only thing that saves the world is the little handful of disinterested men that are in it.

The great war that broke so suddenly upon the world two years ago, and which has swept up within its flame so great a part of thecivilized world, has affected us very profoundly.... With its causes and its objects we are not concerned. The obscure fountains from which its stupendous flood has burst we are not interested to search for or explore.

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

The greatest and truest models for all oratorsis Demosthenes. One who has not studied deeply and constantly all the great speeches of the great Athenian, is not prepared to speak in public. Only as the constant companion of Demosthenes, Burke, Fox, Canning and Webster, can we hope to become orators.