Woodrow Wilson Quotes

280 Sourced Quotes

I yield to no one precedence in love for the South. But because I love the South, I rejoice in the failure of the Confederacy.

Woodrow Wilson
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.

Woodrow Wilson
From the dim morning hours of history when the father was king and priest down to this modern time of history's high noon when nations stand forth full grown and self-governed, the law of coherence and continuity in political development has suffered no serious breach.

Woodrow Wilson
We are in the presence of a new organization of society. Our life has broken away from the past.

Woodrow Wilson
Prosperity … is necessarily the first theme of a political campaign.

Woodrow Wilson
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...

Woodrow Wilson
It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.

Woodrow Wilson
We are constantly thinking of the great war … which which we think today as a war which saved the Union, and it did indeed save the Union, but it was a war that did a great deal more than that. It created in this country what had never existed before — a national consciousness. It was not the salvation of the Union, it was the rebirth of the Union.

Woodrow Wilson
1. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at.
2. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas.
[...]
5. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims.

Woodrow Wilson
The great malady of public life is cowardice. Most men are not untrue, but they are afraid. Most of the errors of public life, if my observation is to be trusted, come not because men are morally bad, but because they are afraid of somebody. God knows why they should be: it is generally shadows they are afraid of.

Woodrow Wilson
A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying to do. We are trying to do a futile thing if we do not know where we came from or what we have been about.

Woodrow Wilson
The Senate of the United States has been both extravagantly praised and unreasonably disparaged, according to the predisposition and temper of its various critics... The truth is, in this case as in so many others, something quite commonplace and practical. The Senate is just what the mode of its election and the conditions of public life in this country make it.

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

Woodrow Wilson
The sum of the whole matter is this, that our civilization cannot survive materially unless it be redeemed spiritually.

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

Woodrow Wilson
They do not need our praise. They do not need that our admiration should sustain them. There is no immortality that is safer than theirs. We come not for their sakes but for our own, in order that we may drink at the same springs of inspiration from which they themselves drank.

Woodrow Wilson
We are not put into this world to sit still and know; we are put into it to act. It is true that in order to learn men must for a little while withdraw from action, must seek some quiet place of remove from the bustle of affairs, where their thoughts may run clear and tranquil, and the heats of business be for the time put off; but that cloistered refuge is no place to dream in.

Woodrow Wilson
Every people has a right to choose the sovereignty under which they shall live.

Woodrow Wilson
Some Americans need hyphens in their names because only half of them has come over.

Woodrow Wilson
Segregation is not humiliating but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen. If your organization goes out and tells the colored people of the country that it is a humiliation, they will so regard it, but if you do not tell them so, and regard it rather as a benefit, they will regard it the same. The only harm that will come will be if you cause them to think it is a humiliation... If this organization is ever to have another hearing before me it must have another spokesman. Your manner offends me...

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
Hunger does not breed reform; it breeds madness and all the ugly distempers that make an ordered life impossible.

Woodrow Wilson
I always remember that America was established not to create wealth—though any nation must create wealth which is going to make an economic foundation for its life—but to realize a vision, to realize an ideal. America has put itself under bonds to the earth to discover and maintain liberty now among men, and if she cannot see liberty now with the clear, unerring vision she had at the outset, she has lost her title, she has lost every claim to the leadership and respect of the nations of the world.

Woodrow Wilson
There is little for the great part of the history of the world except the bitter tears of pity and the hot tears of wrath.

Woodrow Wilson
I would … rather lose in a cause that I know some day will triumph than triumph in a cause that I know some day will lose.

Woodrow Wilson
The Office of the President requires the constitution of an athlete, the patience of a mother, and the endurance of an early Christian.… The President is a superior kind of slave.

Woodrow Wilson
The object of education is not merely to draw out the powers of the individual mind: it is rather its right object to draw all minds to a proper adjustment to the physical and social world in which they are to have their life and their development: to enlighten, strengthen and make fit.

Woodrow Wilson
Uncompromising thought is the luxury of the closeted recluse.

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

Woodrow Wilson