Woodrow Wilson Quotes

280 Sourced Quotes

If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it.

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
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
Our object now, as then, is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power, and to set up among the really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth insure the observance of those principles.

Woodrow Wilson
It is the object of learning, not only to satisfy the curiosity and perfect the spirits of ordinary men, but also to advance civilization.

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

Woodrow Wilson
I lived a dream life (almost too exclusively, perhaps) when I was a lad and even now my thought goes back for refreshment to thosedays when all the world seemed to be a place of heroic adventure in which one's heart must keep its own counsel.

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

Woodrow Wilson
Interest does not tie nations together; it sometimes separates them. But sympathy and understanding does unite them.

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

Woodrow Wilson
I believe in Democracy because it releases the energies of every human being.

Woodrow Wilson
I must beg you to indulge me in the matter of hyphens.... You will find that I have marked out a great many in the proofs. We arein danger of Germanizing our printing by using them so much, and I have a very decided preference in the matter.

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

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

Woodrow Wilson
Has justice ever grown in the soil of absolute power? Has not justice always come from the... heart and spirit of men who resist power?

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
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 facts of the case will always have the better of [an] argument.

Woodrow Wilson
No task, rightly done, is truly private. It is part of the world s work.

Woodrow Wilson
Things get very lonely in Washington sometimes. The real voice of the great people of America sometimes sounds faint and distant in that strange city. You hear politics until you wish that both parties were smothered in their own gas.

Woodrow Wilson
Some of the greatest and most lasting effects of genuine oratory have gone forth from secluded lecture desks into the hearts of quiet groups of students.

Woodrow Wilson
To fight, you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fibre of national life...

Woodrow Wilson
The purpose of a university should be to make a son as unlike his father as possible. By the time a man has grown old enough to have a son in college he has specialized. The university should generalize the treatment of its undergraduates, should struggle to put them in touch with every force of life.

Woodrow Wilson
No man ever saw the people of whom he forms a part. No man ever saw a government. I live in the midst of the Government of the United States, but I never saw the Government of the United States. Its personnel extends through all the nations, and across the seas, and into every corner of the world in the persons of the representatives of the United States in foreign
capitals and in foreign centres of commerce.

Woodrow Wilson