Woodrow Wilson Quotes

What is the use of voting? We know that the machines of both parties are subsidized by the same persons, and therefore it is useless to turn in either direction.

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?

Unless justice be done to others it will not be done to us.

The man who has no vision will undertake no great enterprise.

There's not an idea in our heads that has not been worn shiny by someone else's brains.

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

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.

The beauty of a democracy is that you never can tell when a youngster is born what he is going to do with himself, and that no matter how humbly he is born, no matter where he is born, no matter what circumstances hamper him at the outset, he has got a chance to master the minds and lead the imaginations of the whole country.

The only use of an obstacle is to be overcome. All that an obstacle does with brave men is, not to frighten them, but to challenge them.

Provision for others is a fundamental responsibility of human life.

I have rather a strange objection to talking from the back platform of a train.... It changes too often. It moves around and shifts its ground too often. I like a platform that stays put.

Every one at the bottom of his heart cherishes vanity; even the toad thinks himself good-looking,--"rather tawny perhaps, but look at his eye!

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

We are not put into this world to sit still and know; we are put into it to act.

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.

The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make.

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.

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

The men who act stand nearer to the mass of man than the men who write; and it is in their hands that new thought gets its translation into the crude language of deeds.

Government is not a warfare of interests.

Neutrality is a negative word. It is a word that does not express what America ought to feel. America has a heart, and that heart throbs with all sorts of intense sympathies... We are not trying to keep out of trouble; we are trying to preserve the foundations upon which peace can be rebuilt.

A man's rootage is more important than his leafage.

If you want to make enemies, try to change something.

There was a time when corporations played a minor part in our business affairs, but now they play the chief part, and most men are the servants of corporations.

I am not willing to be drawn further into the toils. I cannot accede to the acceptance of gifts upon terms which take the educational policy of the university out of the hands of the Trustees and Faculty and permit it to be determined by those who give money.

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.

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 foreigncapitals and in foreign centres of commerce.

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.

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.

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

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.

God knows that any man who would seek the presidency of the United States is a fool for his pains. The burden is all but intolerable, and the things that I have to do are just as much as the human spirit can carry.

The trouble with the theory [of limited and divided government] is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. This is where the living and breathing constitution comes from. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life.

Liberty cannot live apart from constitutional

Golf is a game in which one endeavors to control a ball with implements ill adapted for the purpose.

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

Man is much more than a 'rational being' and lives more by sympathies and impressions than by conclusions. It darkens his eyes and dries up the wells of his humanity to be forever in search of doctrine. We need wholesome, experiencing na­tures, I dare affirm, much more than we need sound reasoning.

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.

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.

America is not anything if it consists of each of us. It is something only if it consists of all of us...

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

Nothing was ever done so systematically as nothing is being done now.

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

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.

Politics I conceive to be nothing more than the science of the ordered progress of society along the lines of greatest usefulness and convenience to itself.

They do not need our praise. They do not need that our admiration should sustain them. There is no immortality that is safer than theirs. We come not for their sakes but for our own, in order that we may drink at the same springs of inspiration from which they themselves drank.

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.

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.

The ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people.

Uncompromising thought is the luxury of the closeted recluse. Untrammeled reasoning is the indulgence of the philosopher, of the dreamer of sweet dreams.

It is not men that interest or disturb me primarily; it is ideas. Ideas live; men die.

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.

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

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, and her example, her assistance, her encouragement, has thrilled two continents in this western world with all those fine impulses which have built up human liberty on sides of the water. She stands, therefore, as an example of independence, as an example of free institutions, and as an example of disinterested international action in the main tenets of justice.

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 rule for every man is, not to depend on the education which other men have prepared for him-not even to consent to it; but to strive to see things as they are, and to be himself as he is. Defeat lies in self-surrender.

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

Loyalty means nothing unless it has at its heart the absolute principle of self-sacrifice.

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.