Woodrow Wilson Quotes

280 Sourced Quotes

War isn't declared in the name of God; it is a human affair entirely.

Woodrow Wilson
No country can afford to have its prosperity originated by a small controlling class. The treasury of America lies in those ambitions, those energies, that cannot be restricted to a special favored class. It depends upon the inventions of unknown men, upon the originations of unknown men, upon the ambitions of unknown men. Every country is renewed out of the ranks of the unknown, not out of the ranks of those already famous and powerful and in control.

Woodrow Wilson
The nation's honor is dearer than the nation's comfort; yes, than the nation's life itself.

Woodrow Wilson
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.

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

Woodrow Wilson
Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war.

Woodrow Wilson
I am not sure that it is of the first importance that you should be happy. Many an unhappy man has been of deep service to himself and to the world.

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
No student knows his subject: the most he knows is where and how to find out the things he does not know.

Woodrow Wilson
The success of a party means little except when the Nation is using that party for a large and definite purpose.

Woodrow Wilson
But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts

Woodrow Wilson
The question upon which the whole future peace and policy of the world depends is this: Is the present war a struggle for a just and secure peace, or only for a new balance of power? If it be only a struggle for a new balance of power, who will guarantee, who can guarantee, the stable equilibrium of the new arrangement? Only a tranquil Europe can be a stable Europe. There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace.

Woodrow Wilson
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.

Woodrow Wilson
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.

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

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
It would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.

Woodrow Wilson
It does not become America that within her borders, where every man is free to follow the dictates of his conscience, men should raise the cry of church against church. To do that is to strike at the very spirit and heart of America.

Woodrow Wilson
I have not written a book since the campaign. I did not write this book at all. It is the result of the editorial literary skill of Mr. William Bayard Hale, who has put together here in their right sequences the more suggestive portions of my campaign speeches.
And yet it is not a book of campaign speeches. It is a discussion of a number of very vital subjects in the free form of extemporaneously spoken words. I have left the sentences in the form in which they were stenographically reported. I have not tried to alter the easy-going and often colloquial phraseology in which they were uttered from the platform, in the hope that they would seem the more fresh and spontaneous because of their very lack of pruning and recasting.

Woodrow Wilson
Conservatism is the policy of making no changes and consulting your grandmother when in doubt.

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

Woodrow Wilson
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.

Woodrow Wilson
Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end, and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.

Woodrow Wilson
There are two beings who assess character instantly by looking into the eyes,—dogs and children. If a dog not naturally possessed of the devil will not come to you after he has looked you in the face, you ought to go home and examine your conscience; and if a little child, from any other reason than mere timidity, looks you in the face, and then draws back and will not come to your knee, go home and look deeper yet into your conscience.

Woodrow Wilson
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.

Woodrow Wilson
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.

Woodrow Wilson
The Constitution was not made to fit us like a straitjacket. In its elasticity lies its chief greatness.

Woodrow Wilson
Once lead this people into war and they will forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.

Woodrow Wilson
You cannot be friends upon any other terms than upon the terms of equality.

Woodrow Wilson
I can imagine no greater disservice to the country than to establish a system of censorship that would deny to the people of a free republic like our own their indisputable right to criticise their own public officials. While exercising the great powers of the office I hold, I would regret in a crisis like the one through which we are now passing to lose the benefit of patriotic and intelligent criticism.

Woodrow Wilson