Woodrow Wilson Quotes

“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.”

“There is no indispensable man.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We forget that there is much more patriotism in having the audacity to differ from the majority than in running before the crowd; we forget that in the resistance of the minority some of the biggest things in our own history have been accomplished, and the man who looks on the Stars and Stripes and doesn't hold a right to say nay to his neighbor, even if the neighbor is of the larger party, has forgotten the history of his country.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“Conformity will be the only virtue and any man who refuses to conform will have to pay the penalty.”

“The seed of revolution is repression.”

“What we seek is the reign of law, based upon the consent of the governed and sustained by the organized opinion of mankind.”

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

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

“Hunger does not breed reform; it breeds madness and all the distemper's that make an ordered life impossible.”

“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.”

“A fault which humbles a person is of more use to him or her than a good action which puffs him or her up.”

“Bagehot did what so many thousand of young graduates before him had done,--he studied for the bar; and then, having prepared himself to practise law, followed another large body of young men in deciding to abandon it.”

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

“Statesmen have to bend to the collective will of their peoples or be broken.”

“Once lead this people into war, and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight, you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fiber of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street.”

“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.”

“When the representatives of "Big Business" think of the people, they do not include themselves.”

“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.”