Woodrow Wilson Quotes

280 Sourced Quotes

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.

Woodrow Wilson
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.

Woodrow Wilson
It 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
Man is much more than a 'rational being' and lives more by sympathies and impressions than by conclusions. It darkens his eyes and dries up the wells of his humanity to be forever in search of doctrine. We need wholesome, experiencing na­tures, I dare affirm, much more than we need sound reasoning.

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

Woodrow Wilson
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.

Woodrow Wilson
The cure for bad politics is the same as the cure for tuberculosis. It is living in the open.

Woodrow Wilson
Your real statesman is first of all, and chief of all, a great human being, with an eye for all the great fields on which men likehimself struggle, with unflagging, pathetic hope, toward better things.... He is a guide, a counselor, a mentor, a servant, a friend of mankind.

Woodrow Wilson
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.

Woodrow Wilson
I believe in human liberty as I believe in the wine of life. There is no salvation for men in the pitiful condescension of industrial masters. Guardians have no place in a land of freemen.

Woodrow Wilson
This little world, this little state, this little commonwealth of our own....

Woodrow Wilson
The way to be patriotic in America is not only to love America, but to love the duty that lies nearest to our hand, and to know that in performing it we are serving our country.

Woodrow Wilson
The soul of me is very selfish. I have gone my way after a fashion that made me the center of the plan. And you who are so individual, who are so independent a spirit, whose soul is also a kingdom, have been so loyal, so forgiving, so self-sacrificing in your willingness to live my life. Nothing but love cold have accomplished so wonderful a thing.

Woodrow Wilson
You have just taken an oath of allegiance to the United States. Of allegiance to whom? Of allegiance to no one, unless it be God. Certainly not of allegiance to those who temporarily represent this great government. You have taken an oath of allegiance to a great ideal, to a great body of principles, to a great hope of the human race.

Woodrow Wilson
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.

Woodrow Wilson
To conquer with arms is to make only a temporary conquest; to conquer the world by earning its esteem is to make a permanent conquest.

Woodrow Wilson
There is no more subtle dissolvent of morals than sentimentality.

Woodrow Wilson
If you wish your children to be Christians you must really take the trouble to be Christian yourselves. Those are the only terms upon which the home will work the gracious miracle.

Woodrow Wilson
I am the friend of peace and mean to preserve it for America so long as I am able.... No course of my choosing or of their (nations at war) will lead to war. War can come only by the wilful acts and aggressions of others.

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

Woodrow Wilson
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.

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

Woodrow Wilson
It was necessary to put the South at a moral disadvantage by transforming the contest from a war waged against states fighting for their indepdence into a war waged against states fighting for the maintenance and extension of slavery...and the world, it might be hoped, would see it as a moral war, not a political; and the sympathy of nations would begin to run for the North, not for the South.

Woodrow Wilson
Scholarship cannot do without literature.... It needs literature to float it, to set it current, to authenticate it to all the race, to get it out of closets and into the brains of men who stir abroad.

Woodrow Wilson
Nothing was ever done so systematically as nothing is being done now.

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
Men are not put into this world to go the path of ease, they are put into this world to go the path of pain and struggle.

Woodrow Wilson
The light that shined upon the summit now seems almost to shine at our feet.

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

Woodrow Wilson
The profession I chose was politics; the profession I entered was law. I entered the one because I thought it would lead to the other.

Woodrow Wilson