Quotes by Woodrow Wilson

Gossips are only sociologists upon a mean and petty scale.

Power consists in one's capacity to link his will with the purpose of others, to lead by reason and a gift of cooperation.

A man may be defeated by his own secondary successes.

One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty councils. The thing is to supply light and not heat.

The spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into every fiber of our national life.

Without dependability one's ability may be a liability instead of an asset.

The only place in the world that nothing has to be explained to me is the South.

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.

No people are true Christians who do not think constantly of how they can lift their brother and sister, how they can assist their friends, how they can enlighten mankind, how they can make virtue the rule of conduct in the circle in which they live.

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?

We grow through our dreams. All great men and women are dreamers. Some, however, allow their dreams to die. You should nurse your dreams and protect them through bad times and tough times to the sunshine and light which always come.

I confess my belief in the common man.... The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.... The man who is in the melee knows what blows are being struck and what blood is being drawn.

Liberty does not consist in mere declarations of the rights of man. It consists in the translation of those declarations into definite action.

They the children live in a world of delightful imagination; they pursue persons and objects that never existed; they make an Argosy laden with gold out of a floating butterfly, -- and these stupid grown-up people try to translate these things into uninteresting facts.

The whole purpose of democracy is that we may hold counsel with one another, so as not to depend upon the understanding of one man.

Thought cannot conceive of anything that may not be brought to expression. He who first uttered it may be only the suggester, but the doer will appear.

We live in an age disturbed, confused, bewildered, afraid of its own forces, in search not merely of its road but even of its direction.

Just what is it that America stands for? If she stands for one thing more than another it is for the sovereignty of self-governing people.

Such a mind we must desire to see in a woman, -- a mind that stirs without irritating you, that arouses but does not belabour, amuses and yet subtly instructs.

In the last analysis, my fellow country men, as we in America would be the first to claim, a people are responsible for the acts of their government.

A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American. And the man who goes among you to trade upon your nationality is no worthy son to live under the Stars and Stripes.

The Government of the United States would be constrained to hold the Imperial German government to a strict accountability for such acts of their naval authorities.

We grow by our dreams.

Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too much of government, and at the same time do for it too little... We must strive for normalcy to reach stability.

Only a peace between equals can last. Only a peace the very principle of which is equality and a common participation in a common benefit.

The way to be patriotic in America is not only to love America, but to love the duty that lies nearest to our hand, and to know that in performing it we are serving our country.

What is at the heart of all national problems? It is that we have seen the hand of material interest sometimes about to close upon our dearest rights and possessions.

If you would be a leader of men you must lead your own generation, not the next. Your playing must be good now, while the play ison the boards and the audience in the seats.... It will not get you the repute of a good actor to have excellencies discovered in you afterwards.

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.

Justice has nothing to do with expediency. Justice has nothing to do with any temporary standard whatever. It is rooted and grounded in the fundamental instincts of humanity.

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.

Surely a man has come to himself only when he has found the best that is in him, and has satisfied his heart with the highest achievement he is fit for.

Sciencehas won for us a great liberty in the physical world, a liberty from superstitious fear and from disease, a freedom touse nature as a familiar servant; but it has not freed us from ourselves.

I am not one of those who have the least anxiety about the triumph of the principles I have stood for. I have seen fools resist Providence before, and I have seen their destruction, as will come upon these again, utter destruction and contempt. That we shall prevail is as sure as that God reigns.

The world can be at peace only if the world is stable, and there can be no stability where the will is in rebellion, where there is not tranquility of spirit and a sense of justice, of freedom, and of right.

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.

If Germany won it would change the course of our civilization and make the United States a military nation and it would check his policy for a better international ethical code.

Today's greatest labor-saving device is tomorrow.

I am all kinds of a democrat, so far as I can discover but the root of the whole business is this, that I believe in the patriotism and energy and initiative of the average man.

The welfare, the happiness, the energy and spirit of the men and women who do the daily workis the underlying necessity of all prosperity.... There can be nothing wholesome unless their life is wholesome; there can be no contentment unless they are contented.

There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized peace.

Whate'er my doom;
It cannot be unhappy: God hath given me
The boon of resignation.

The Constitution of the United States is not a mere lawyers' document. It is a vehicle of life, and its spirit is always the spirit of the age. Its prescriptions are clear and we know what they arebut life is always your last and most authoritative critic.

Fear God and you need not fear anyone else.

An evident principleis the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak.

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

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.

The cure for bad politics is the same as the cure for tuberculosis. It is living in the open.

If you've made up your mind you can do something, you're absolutely RIGHT.

Some people have a large circle of friends while others have only friends that they like.

Never murder a man when he's busy committing suicide.

The allied nations with the fullest concurrence of our government and people are agreed that in Palestine shall be laid the foundations of a Jewish Commonwealth.

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.

Your enlightenment depends on the company you keep. You do not know the world until you know the men who have possessed it and tried its wares before you were ever given your brief run upon it.

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

I believe very profoundly in an over-ruling Providence, and I do not fear that any real plans can be thrown off the track. It maynot be intended that I shall be President -- but that would not break my heart.

Opinion is the great, indeed the only coordinating force in our system.

While we are fighting for freedom, we must see, among other things, that labor is free.

There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight.

Benevolence does not consist in those who are prosperous pitying and helping those who are not. It consists in fellow feeling that puts you upon actually the same level with the fellow who suffers.

I have the feeling that he would rather see a good cause fail than succeed if he were not the head of it.

Let it be your pride to show all men everywhere not only what good soldiers you are, but also what good men you are.

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.

If Freud had worn a kilt in the prescribed Highland manner he might have had a very different attitude to genitals.

When I think of the flag.... I see alternate strips of parchment upon which are written the rights of liberty and justice, and stripes of blood to vindicate those rights, and then, in the corner, a prediction of the blue serene into which every nation may swim which stands for these great things.

A living thing is born.

Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at.

Any man that resists the present tides that run in the world, will find himself thrown upon a shore so high and barren that it will seem he has been separated from his human kind forever.

Where the great force lies, there must be the sanction of peace.

If you lose your wealth, you have lost nothing; if you lose your health, you have lost something; but if you lose your character, you have lost everything.

I am not one of those who believe that a great standing army is the means of maintaining peace, because if you build up a great profession those who form parts of it want to exercise their profession.

As a matter of fact and experience, the more power is divided the more irresponsible it becomes.

The greatest and truest models for all oratorsis Demosthenes. One who has not studied deeply and constantly all the great speeches of the great Athenian, is not prepared to speak in public. Only as the constant companion of Demosthenes, Burke, Fox, Canning and Webster, can we hope to become orators.

The difference between a strong man and a weak one is that the former does not give up after a defeat.

There is a price which is too great to pay for peace, and that price can be put in one word. One cannot pay the price of self-respect.

We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

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.

What every man seeks is satisfaction. He deceives himself so long as he imagines it to lie in self-indulgence.

The Bible is the one supreme source of revelation of the meaning of life, the nature of God and spiritual nature and need of men. It is the only guide of life which really leads the spirit in the way of peace and salvation.

This little world, this little state, this little commonwealth of our own.

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.

We are provincials no longer. The tragic events of the 30 months of vital turmoil through which we have just passed have made us citizens of the world. There can be no turning back.

Whatever may be said against the chewing of tobacco, this at least can be said of it, that it gives a man time to think between sentences.

I could see now that a literary education did not fit one for the popular novelist's trade.Once you had started using words like flavicomous or acroamatic, because you liked the sound of them, you were lost.

The presidential office is not a rosewater affair. This is an office in which a man must put on his war paint.

I firmly believe in Divine Providence. Without belief in Providence I think I should go crazy. Without God the world would be a maze without a clue.

To be free is not necessarily to be wise. Wisdom comes with counsel, with the frank and free conference of untrammeled men united in the common interest.

A right is worth fighting for only when it can be put into operation.

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

You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.

We are not here merely to make a living. We are here to enrich the world.

One cool judgement is worth a thousand hasty councils.

America was born to exemplify that devotion to the elements of righteousness which are derived from the revelations of the Holy Scripture.

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.

I have always in my own thought summed up individual liberty, and business liberty, and every other kind of liberty, in the phrase that is common in the sporting world, 'A free field and no favor.'

People will endure their tyrants for years, but they tear their deliverers to pieces if a millennium is not created immediately.

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

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

We can afford to exercise the self-restraint of a really great nation which realizes its own strength and scorns to misuse it.

To make the world safe for democracy.

You know how impossible it is, in short, to have a free nation if it is a military nation and under military orders.

My hope is ... that we may recover ... something of a renewal of that vision of the law with which men may be supposed to have started out with in the old days of the oracles, who communed with the intimations of divinity.

Never for a moment have I had one doubt about my religious beliefs. There are people who believe only so far as they can understand -- that seems to me presumptuous and sets their understanding as the standard of the universe.

For my part, I am very much more afraid of the man who does a bad thing and does not know it is bad than of the man who does a bad thing and knows it is bad; because I think that in public affairs stupidity is more dangerous than knavery, because harder to fight and dislodge.

The spirit of William Penn will not be stayed. You cannot set limits to such knightly adventurers. After their own day is gone their spirits stalk the world, carrying inspiration everywhere that they go and reminding men of the lineage, the fine lineage, of those who have sought justice and right.

Death, like the quintessence of otherness, is for others.

The man who reads everything is like the man who eats everything: he can digest nothing, and the penalty of crowding one's mind with other men's thoughts is to have no thoughts of one's own.

We have not given science too big a place in our education, but we have made a perilous mistake in giving it too great a preponderance in method in every other branch of study.

It recognizes no morality but a sham morality meant for deceit, no honor even among thieves and of a thievish sort, no force but physical force, no intellectual power but cunning, no disgrace but failure, no crime but stupidity.

It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilizationitself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things we have always carried closest to our hearts.

It has become a people's war, and peoples of all sorts and races, of every degree of power and variety of fortune, are involved inits sweeping processes of change and settlement.

Self-determination is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative principle of action, which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril.

We shall fight for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.

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

The legislator must be in advance of his age.
Across the mind of the statesman flash ever and anon the brilliant, though partial, intimations of future events.... Something which is more than fore-sight and less than prophetic knowledge marks the statesman a peculiar being among his contemporaries.

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.

No man has ever risen to the stature of spiritual manhood until he has found that it is finer to serve somebody else than it is to serve himself.

The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation--until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.

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

The natural man inevitably rebels against mathematics, a mild form of torture that could only be learned by painful processes of drill.

Justice, and only justice, shall always be our motto.

We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers.

We came to America, either ourselves or in the persons of our ancestors, to better the ideals of men, to make them see finer things than they had seen before, to get rid of the things that divide and to make sure of the things that unite.

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.

Uncompromising thought is the luxury of the closeted recluse.

Some of us let these great dreams die, but others nourish and protect them; nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light.