Woodrow Wilson Quotes

“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.”

“The Constitution was not made to fit us like a straitjacket. In its elasticity lies its chief greatness.”

“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.”

“Death comes along like a gas bill one can't payand that's all one can sayabout it.”

“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.”

“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.”

“A conservative is a man who just sits and thinks, mostly sits.”

“One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty counsels. The thing to do is to supply light and not heat.”

“In fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same. They both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members. Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals. Limits of wisdom and convenience to the public control there may be: limits of principle there are, upon strict analysis, none.”

“Only peace between equals can last.”

“The competent leader of men cares little for the niceties of other peoples' characters: he cares much--everything--for the exterior uses to which they may be put.... These are men to be moved. How should he move them? He supplies the power; others simply the materials on which that power operates.”

“As compared with the college politician, the real article seems like an amateur.”

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

“The world is not looking for servants, there are plenty of these, but for masters, men who form their purposes and then carry them out, let the consequences be what they may.”

“Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at.”

“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country.”

“I had rather be defeated in a cause that will ultimately triumph than triumph in a cause that will ultimately be defeated.”

“The highest and best form of efficiency is the spontaneous cooperation of a free people.”

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

“A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.”

“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 living thing is born.”

“Leadership does not always wear the harness of compromise.”

“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.”

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