Woodrow Wilson

“The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name.... We must be impartial in thought as well as in actiona nationthat neither sits in judgment upon others nor is disturbed in her own counsels and which keeps herself fit and free to do what is honest and disinterested and truly serviceable for the peace of the world.”

“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.”

“Character, my friends, is a byproduct. It is produced in the great manufacture of daily duty.”

“The great monopoly in this country is the money monopoly. So long as it exists, our old variety of freedom and individual energy of development are out of the question.”

“That a peasant may become king does not render the kingdom democratic.”

“We grow by our dreams.”

“It is imperative that we should not only master them, but also act upon them, and act very definitely.”

“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickenswith the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”

“So far as the colleges go, the side-shows have swallowed up the circus, and we don't know what is going on in the main tent: and I don't want to continue as ringmaster under those conditions.”

“But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts--for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own Governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, 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.”

“Every man who takes office in Washington either grows or swells, and when I give a man an office, I watch him carefully to see whether he is swelling or growing. The mischief of it is that when they swell, they do not swell enough to burst.”

“Not all change is progress.”

“Property as compared with humanity, as compared with the red blood in the American people, must take second place, not first place.”

“It is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shouting at you.”

“The way to stop financial joyriding is to arrest the chauffeur, not the automobile.”

“The light that shined upon the summit now seems almost to shine at our feet.”

“There are blessed intervals when I forget by one means or another that I am President of the United States.”

“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.”

“The awakening of the people of China to the possibilities under free government is the most significant, if not the most momentous, event of our generation.”

“The commands of democracy are as imperative as its privileges and opportunities are wide and generous. Its compulsion is upon us.”

“The princes among us are those who forget themselves and serve others.”

“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.”

“At every crisis in one's life, it is absolute salvation to have some sympathetic friend to whom you can think aloud without restraint or misgiving.”

“A man may be defeated by his own secondary successes.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Tell me what is right and I will fight for it.”

“I want the people to love me, but I suppose they never will.”

“Your real statesman is first of all, and chief of all, a great human being, with an eye for all the great fields on which men likehimself struggle, with unflagging, pathetic hope, toward better things.... He is a guide, a counselor, a mentor, a servant, a friend of mankind.”

“It is a protest against the way the world has worked. (explanation of Bolshevism)”

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

“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.”

“Generally young men are regarded as radicals. This is a popular misconception. The most conservative persons I ever met are college undergraduates. The radicals are the men past middle life.”

“The firm basis of government is justice, not pity.”

“Liberty has never come from Government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.”

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

“You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.”

“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.”

“I came from the South and I know what war is, for I have seen its wreckage and terrible ruin. It is easy for me as President to declare war. I do not have to fight, and neither do the gentlemen on the Hill who now clamour for it. It is some poor farmer's boy, or son of some poor widow away off in some modest community, or perhaps the scion of a great family, who will have to do the fighting.”

“I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it.”

“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.”

“I have had the accomplishment of something like this at heart ever since I was a boy.... So I feel tonight like the man who is lodging happily in the inn which lies half way along the journey and that in time, with a fresh impulse, we shall go the rest of the journey and sleep at the journey's end like men with a quiet conscience.”

“You cannot be friends upon any other terms than upon the terms of equality.”

“The man who disparages music as a luxury and non-essential is doing the nation an injury. Music now, more than ever before, is a national need.”

“A living thing is born.”

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

“There can be no equality or opportunity if men and women and children be not shielded in their lives from the consequences of great industrial and social processes which they cannot alter, control, or singly cope with.”

“It is easier to move a cemetery than to change a curriculum.”

“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.”

“Every people has a right to choose the sovereignty under which they shall live.”