Woodrow Wilson Quotes

280 Sourced Quotes

When you come into the presence of a leader of men, you know that you have come into the presence of fire - that it is best not uncautiously to touch that man - that there is something that makes it dangerous to cross him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Woodrow Wilson
When the representatives of "Big Business" think of the people, they do not include themselves.

Woodrow Wilson
I do not want to live under a philanthropy. I do not want to be taken care of by the government.... We do not want a benevolent government. We want a free and a just government.

Woodrow Wilson
Be militant! Be an organization that is going to do things! If you can find older men who will give you countenance and acceptableleadership, follow them; but if you cannot, organize separately and dispense with them. There are only two sorts of men to be associated with when something is to be done: Those are young men and men who never grow old.

Woodrow Wilson
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.

Woodrow Wilson
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.

Woodrow Wilson
Excesses accomplish nothing. Disorder immediately defeats itself.

Woodrow Wilson
Jefferson's Declaration of Independence is a practical document for the use of practical men. It is not a thesis for philosophers, but a whip for tyrants; it is not a theory of government but a program of action.

Woodrow Wilson
Rhode Island was settled and is made up of people who found it unbearable to live anywhere else in New England.

Woodrow Wilson
I am all kinds of a democrat, so far as I can discover but the root of the whole business is this, that I believe in the patriotism and energy and initiative of the average man.

Woodrow Wilson