Woodrow Wilson - Nation Quotes

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I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty.

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

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
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
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
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
Energy in a nation is like sap in a tree; it rises from bottom up.

Woodrow Wilson
Great statesmen seem to direct and rule by a sort of power to put themselves in the place of the nation over which they are set, and may thus be said to possess the souls of poets at the same time they display the coarser sense and the more vulgar sagacity of practical men of business.

Woodrow Wilson
We are participants, whether we would or not, in the life of the world.... We are partners with the rest. What affects mankind isinevitably our affair as well as the nations of Europe and Asia.

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

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

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

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

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
Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American... America is the only idealistic nation in the world.

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
Some men who are not real men love other things about themselves, but the real man believes that his honor is dearer than his life; and a nation is merely all of us put together, and the nation's honor is dearer than the nation's comfort and the nation's peace and the nation's life itself.

Woodrow Wilson
A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.

Woodrow Wilson
The supreme test of the nation has come. We must all speak, act, and serve together!

Woodrow Wilson
A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men who, even if their action be honest and intended for the public interest, are necessarily concentrated upon the great undertakings in which their own money is involved and who necessarily, by very reason of their own limitations, chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom. This is the greatest question of all, and to this statesmen must address themselves with an earnest determination to serve the long future and the true liberties of men.

Woodrow Wilson
This war had its roots in the disregard of the rights of small nations and of nationalities which lacked the union and the force to make good their claim to determine their own allegiances and their own forms of political life. Covenants must now be entered into which will render such things impossible for the future; and those covenants must be backed by the united force of all the nations that love justice and are willing to maintain it at any cost.

Woodrow Wilson
There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight; there is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.

Woodrow Wilson
The only thing that has ever distinguished America among the nations is that she has shown that all men are entitled to the benefits of the law.

Woodrow Wilson
Settlements may be temporary, but the action of the nations in the interest of peace and justice must be permanent. We can set up permanent processes. We may not be able to set up permanent decisions.

Woodrow Wilson
The question of armaments, whether on land or sea, is the most immediately and intensely practical question connected with the future fortunes of nations and of mankind.

Woodrow Wilson