Woodrow Wilson Quotes

280 Sourced Quotes

The shadows that now lie dark upon our path will soon be dispelled and we shall walk with the light all about us if we but be true to ourselves.

Woodrow Wilson
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.

Woodrow Wilson
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 Wilson
The wisest thing to do with a fool is to encourage him to hire a hall and discourse to his fellow-citizens. Nothing chills nonsense like exposure to the air.

Woodrow Wilson
A radical is one of whom people say ''He goes too far.'' A conservative, on the other hand, is one who ''doesn't go far enough.'' Then there is the reactionary, ''one who doesn't go at all.'' All these terms are more or less objectionable, wherefore we have

Woodrow Wilson
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.

Woodrow Wilson
If you would be a leader of men, you must lead your own generation, not the next.

Woodrow Wilson
The use of a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible.

Woodrow Wilson
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.

Woodrow Wilson
We can afford to exercise the self-restraint of a really great nation which realizes its own strength and scorns to misuse it.

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

Woodrow Wilson
I am so glad that I am young, so that I may give my youth to you.

Woodrow Wilson
Do you never stop to reflect just what it is that America stands for? If she stands for one thing more than another, it is for the sovereignty of self-governing peoples, and her example, her assistance, her encouragement, has thrilled two continents in this Western World with all the fine impulses which have built up human liberty on both sides of the water.

Woodrow Wilson
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.

Woodrow Wilson
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.

Woodrow Wilson
Justice has nothing to do with expediency. Justice has nothing to do with any temporary standard whatever. It is rooted and grounded in the fundamental instincts of humanity.

Woodrow Wilson
Progressiveness means not standing still when everything else is moving.

Woodrow Wilson
We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers. They see things in the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter's evening. Some of us let these great dreams die, but others nourish and protect them; nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light which comes always to those who sincerely hope that their dreams will come true.

Woodrow Wilson
There is a very great thrill to be had from the memories of the American Revolution, but the American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation, and the duty laid upon us by that beginning is the duty of bringing the things then begun to a noble triumph of completion.

Woodrow Wilson
The great monopoly in this country is the money monopoly. So long as it exists, our old variety of freedom and individual energy of development are out of the question.

Woodrow Wilson
Mr. House is my second personality. He is my independent self. His thoughts and mine are one. If I were in his place I would do just as he suggested.

Woodrow Wilson
The law that will work is merely the summing up in legislative form of the moral judgment that the community has already reached.

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

Woodrow Wilson
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.

Woodrow Wilson
This war was a commercial and industrial war. It was not a political war.

Woodrow Wilson