Woodrow Wilson quotes:

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  • You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.

  • Business underlies everything in our national life, including our spiritual life. Witness the fact that in the Lord's Prayer, the first petition is for daily bread. No one can worship God or love his neighbor on an empty stomach.

  • The method of political science is the interpretation of life; its instrument is insight, a nice understanding of subtle, unformulated conditions.

  • A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.

  • There can be no equality or opportunity if men and women and children be not shielded in their lives from the consequences of great industrial and social processes which they cannot alter, control, or singly cope with.

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

  • At every crisis in one's life, it is absolute salvation to have some sympathetic friend to whom you can think aloud without restraint or misgiving.

  • I will not speak with disrespect of the Republican Party. I always speak with respect of the past.

  • In the Lord's Prayer, the first petition is for daily bread. No one can worship God or love his neighbor on an empty stomach.

  • If a dog will not come to you after having looked you in the face, you should go home and examine your conscience.

  • The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.

  • I have long enjoyed the friendship and companionship of Republicans because I am by instinct a teacher, and I would like to teach them something.

  • No man can sit down and withhold his hands from the warfare against wrong and get peace from his acquiescence.

  • My dream of politics all my life has been that it is the common business, that it is something we owe to each other to understand and discuss with absolute frankness.

  • Politics I conceive to be nothing more than the science of the ordered progress of society along the lines of greatest usefulness and convenience to itself.

  • America lives in the heart of every man everywhere who wishes to find a region where he will be free to work out his destiny as he chooses.

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

  • If you want to make enemies, try to change something.

  • The question of armaments, whether on land or sea, is the most immediately and intensely practical question connected with the future fortunes of nations and of mankind.

  • Never attempt to murder a man who is committing suicide.

  • Tell me what is right and I will fight for it.

  • 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.

  • Liberty has never come from Government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.

  • The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.

  • Some Americans need hyphens in their names, because only part of them has come over; but when the whole man has come over, heart and thought and all, the hyphen drops of its own weight out of his name.

  • We have not given science too big a place in our education, but we have made a perilous mistake in giving it too great a preponderance in method in every other branch of study.

  • Princeton is no longer a thing for Princeton men to please themselves with. Princeton is a thing with which Princeton men must satisfy the country.

  • It is like writing history with lightning and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.

  • The history of liberty is a history of resistance.

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

  • Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world.

  • The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation.

  • The legislator must be in advance of his age. Across the mind of the statesman flash ever and anon the brilliant, though partial, intimations of future events.... Something which is more than fore-sight and less than prophetic knowledge marks the statesman a peculiar being among his contemporaries.

  • Have you thought of the sufferings of Armenia? You poured out your money to help succor the Armenians after they suffered; now set your strength so that they shall never suffer again.

  • To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country's service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations.

  • As compared with the college politician, the real article seems like an amateur.

  • 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.

  • There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized peace.

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

  • Big business is not dangerous because it is big, but because its bigness is an unwholesome inflation created by privileges and exemptions which it ought not to enjoy.

  • The flag of the United States has not been created by rhetorical sentences in declarations of independence and in bills of rights. It has been created by the experience of a great people, and nothing is written upon it that has not been written by their life. It is the embodiment, not of a sentiment, but of a history...

  • The only use of an obstacle is to be overcome. All that an obstacle does with brave men is, not to frighten them, but to challenge them.

  • Genius is divine perseverance. Genius I cannot claim nor even extra brightness but perseverance all can have.

  • Prosperity is necessarily the first theme of a political campaign.

  • 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.

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

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

  • No people are true Christians who do not think constantly of how they can lift their brother and sister, how they can assist their friends, how they can enlighten mankind, how they can make virtue the rule of conduct in the circle in which they live.

  • Some people have a large circle of friends while others have only friends that they like.

  • So far as the colleges go, the sideshows are swallowing up the circus.

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

  • Where the great force lies, there must be the sanction of peace.

  • This little world, this little state, this little commonwealth of our own....

  • Never murder a man when he's busy committing suicide.

  • 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 something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.

  • There is a power so organized, so subtle, so complete, and so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.

  • 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.

  • Caution is the confidential agent of selfishness.

  • What we seek is the reign of law, based upon the consent of the governed and sustained by the organized opinion of mankind.

  • No peace can last, or ought to last, which does not recognize and accept the principle that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that no right anywhere exists to hand peoples from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were property.

  • The 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.

  • If you will think about what you ought to do for other people, your character will take care of itself. Character is a by-product, and any man who devotes himself to its cultivation in his own case will become a selfish prig.

  • ...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.

  • I have received delegations of working men who come, apparently speaking of the utmost sincerity, have declared that they would regard it as a genuine hardship to be deprived of their beer.

  • The world must be made safe for democracy.

  • I firmly believe in Divine Providence. Without belief in Providence I think I should go crazy. Without God the world would be a maze without a clue.

  • It must be a peace without victory...Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor's terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last.

  • [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 truth is we are all caught in a great economic system which is heartless.

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

  • An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of Democracy

  • You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand

  • Congress in session is Congress on public exhibition, whilst Congress in its committee-rooms is Congress at work.

  • Fear God and you need not fear anyone else.

  • 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."

  • While we are fighting for freedom, we must see, among other things, that labor is free.

  • 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.

  • When I think of the flag.... I see alternate strips of parchment upon which are written the rights of liberty and justice, and stripes of blood to vindicate those rights, and then, in the corner, a prediction of the blue serene into which every nation may swim which stands for these great things.

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

  • Conformity will be the only virtue and any man who refuses to conform will have to pay the penalty.

  • The 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.

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

  • A conservative is someone who makes no changes and consults his grandmother when in doubt.

  • 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.

  • This is a war to end all wars.

  • The beauty of a democracy is that you never can tell when a youngster is born what he is going to do with himself, and that no matter how humbly he is born, no matter where he is born, no matter what circumstances hamper him at the outset, he has got a chance to master the minds and lead the imaginations of the whole country.

  • I must beg you to indulge me in the matter of hyphens.... You will find that I have marked out a great many in the proofs. We arein danger of Germanizing our printing by using them so much, and I have a very decided preference in the matter.

  • Some Americans need hyphens in their names because only part of them has come over.

  • I am sorry for those that disagree with me because I know that they are wrong.

  • Absolute identity with one's cause is the first and great condition of successful leadership.

  • America was established not to create wealth but to realize a vision, to realize an ideal - to discover and maintain liberty among men.

  • May it not suffice for me to say ... that of course like every other man of intelligence and education I do believe in organic evolution. It surprises me that at this late date such questions should be raised.

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

  • If Freud had worn a kilt in the prescribed Highland manner he might have had a very different attitude to genitals.

  • A living thing is born.

  • We are participants, whether we would or not, in the life of the world.... We are partners with the rest. What affects mankind isinevitably our affair as well as the nations of Europe and Asia.

  • 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.

  • There has been something crude and heartless and unfeeling in our haste to suceed and be great. Our thought has been 'Let every man look out for himself, let every generation look out for itself,' while we reared giant machinery which made it impossible that any but those who stood at the levers of control should have a chance to look out for themselves.

  • We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

  • Loyalty means nothing unless it has at its heart the absolute principle of self-sacrifice.

  • I am not one of those who believe that a great standing army is the means of maintaining peace, because if you build up a great profession those who form parts of it want to exercise their profession.

  • 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.

  • No man has ever risen to the stature of spiritual manhood until he has found that it is finer to serve somebody else than it is to serve himself.

  • 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.

  • Neutrality is a negative word. It does not express what America ought to feel. We are not trying to keep out of trouble; we are trying to preserve the foundations on which peace may be rebuilt.

  • The competent leader of men cares little for the niceties of other peoples' characters: he cares much--everything--for the exterior uses to which they may be put.... These are men to be moved. How should he move them? He supplies the power; others simply the materials on which that power operates.

  • 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.

  • Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too much of government, and at the same time do for it too little. . . . We must strive for normalcy to reach stability.

  • When I give a man an office, I watch him carefully to see whether he is swelling or growing.

  • America cannot be an ostrich with its head in the sand.

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

  • Work is the keystone of a perfect life. Work and trust in God.

  • 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.

  • The ordinary literary man, even though he be an eminent historian, is ill-fitted to be a mentor in affairs of government. For... things are for the most part very simple in books, and in practical life very complex.

  • There is here a great melting pot in which we must compound a precious metal. That metal is the metal of nationality.

  • A presidential campaign may easily degenerate into a mere personal contest, and so lose its real dignity. There is no indispensable man.

  • There is such a thing as man being too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.

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

  • 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.

  • The man who reads everything is like the man who eats everything: he can digest nothing, and the penalty of crowding one's mind with other men's thoughts is to have no thoughts of one's own.

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