Woodrow Wilson Quotes

280 Sourced Quotes

Progressiveness means not standing still when everything else is moving.

Woodrow Wilson
The princes among us are those who forget themselves and serve others.

Woodrow Wilson
No peace can last, or ought to last, which does not recognize and accept the principle that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that no right anywhere exists to hand peoples from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were property.

Woodrow Wilson
I am so glad that I am young, so that I may give my youth to you.

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
We are expected to put the utmost energy, of every power that we have, into the service of our fellow men, never sparing ourselves, not condescending to think of what is going to happen to ourselves, but ready, if need be, to go to the utter length of self-sacrifice.

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

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

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

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
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
There is no more subtle dissolvent of morals than sentimentality.

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

Woodrow Wilson
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
A nation is as great, and only as great, as her rank and file.

Woodrow Wilson
The beauty of a democracy is that you never can tell when a youngster is born what he is going to do with himself, and that no matter how humbly he is born, no matter where he is born, no matter what circumstances hamper him at the outset, he has got a chance to master the minds and lead the imaginations of the whole country.

Woodrow Wilson
And while you bring all countries with you, you come with a purpose of leaving all other countries behind you - bringing what is best of their spirit, but not looking over your shoulders and seeking to perpetuate what you intended to leave behind in them.

Woodrow Wilson
I have sometimes heard men say politics must have nothing to do with business, and I have often wished that business had nothing to do with politics.

Woodrow Wilson
If I cannot retain my moral influence over a man except by occasionally knocking him down, if that is the only basis upon which he will respect me, then for the sake of his soul I have got occasionally to knock him down.

Woodrow Wilson