Woodrow Wilson - Government Quotes

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Democracy is not so much a form of government as a set of principles.

Woodrow Wilson
The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.

Woodrow Wilson
Politics is a war of causes; a joust of principles. Government is too serious a matter to admit of meaningless courtesies.

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
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
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
Government ought to be all outside and no inside.... Everybody knows that corruption thrives in secret places, and avoids public places, and we believe it a fair presumption that secrecy means impropriety.

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
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
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
You have just taken an oath of allegiance to the United States. Of allegiance to whom? Of allegiance to no one, unless it be God. Certainly not of allegiance to those who temporarily represent this great government. You have taken an oath of allegiance to a great ideal, to a great body of principles, to a great hope of the human race.

Woodrow Wilson
There is no indispensable man. The government will not collapse and go to pieces if any one of the gentlemen who are seeking to be entrusted with its guidance should be left at home.

Woodrow Wilson
I have spoken thus only that the whole world may know the true spirit of America — that men everywhere may know that our passion for justice and for self-government is no mere passion of words but a passion which, once set in action, must be satisfied. The power of the United States is a menace to no nation or people. It will never be used in aggression or for the aggrandisement of any selfish interest of our own. lt springs out of freedom and is for the service of freedom.

Woodrow Wilson
America is the place where you cannot kill your government by killing the men who conduct it.

Woodrow Wilson
Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of the government. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it.

Woodrow Wilson
Government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton.

Woodrow Wilson
Government is merely an attempt to express the conscience of everybody, the average conscience of the nation, in the rules that everybody is commanded to obey. That is all it is.

Woodrow Wilson
Freedom exists only where the people take care of the government.

Woodrow Wilson
What I am interested in is having the government of the United States more concerned about human rights than about property rights.

Woodrow Wilson
We are at the parting of the ways. We have, not one or two or three, but many, established and formidable monopolies in the United States. We have, not one or two, but many, fields of endeavor into which it is difficult, if not impossible, for the independent man to enter. We have restricted credit, we have restricted opportunity, we have controlled development, and we have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world — no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men.

Woodrow Wilson
A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible.

Woodrow Wilson
If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it; what we have to determine now is whether we are big enough, whether we are men enough, whether we are free enough, to take possession again of the government which is our own.

Woodrow Wilson