Woodrow Wilson Quotes

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

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

Reality is what I see, not what you see.

The object of love is to serve, not to win

Be militant! Be an organization that is going to do things! If you can find older men who will give you countenance and acceptableleadership, follow them; but if you cannot, organize separately and dispense with them. There are only two sorts of men to be associated with when something is to be done: Those are young men and men who never grow old.

Government, in it's last analysis, is organized force.

The greatest embarrassment of my political career has been that active duties seem to deprive me of time for careful investigation. I seem almost obliged to form conclusions from impressions instead of from study.... I wish that I had more knowledge, more thorough acquaintance, with the matters involved.

I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it.

At last a vision has been vouchsafed to us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good.... With this vision we approach new affairs. Our duty is to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without impairing the good, to purify and humanize every process of our common life, without weakening or sentimentalizing it.

No thoughtful man ever came to the end of his life, and had time and a little space of calm from which to look back upon it, who did not know and acknowledge that it was what he had done unselfishly and for others, and nothing else, that satisfied him in the retrospect, and made him feel that he had played the man.

We [Americans] have a great ardor for gain; but we have a deep passion for the rights of man.

The only thing that saves the world is the little handful of disinterested men that are in it.

All things come to him who waits

Absolute identity with one's cause is the first and great condition of successful leadership.

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

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.

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

A nation is as great, and only as great, as her rank and file.

You must act in your friends' interests whether it pleases them or not; the object of love is to serve, not to win.

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

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

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

The history of liberty is the history of limitations on the power of government, not the increase of it. When we resist, therefore, the concentration of power, we are resisting the processes of death, because concentration of power is what always precedes the destruction of human liberties.

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

I would rather lose in a cause that will some day win, than win in a cause that will some day lose.

Let him [the President] once win the admiration and confidence of the country, and no other single force can withstand him, no combination of forces will easily overpower him.... If he rightly interpret the national thought and boldly insist upon it, he is irresistible; and the country never feels the zest of action so much as when the President is of such insight and caliber.

Responsibility is proportionate to opportunity.

...to make the world safe for democracy.

The growth of our nation and all its activities are in the hands of a few men.

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.

The flag of the United States has not been created by rhetorical sentences in declarations of independence and in bills of rights. It has been created by the experience of a great people, and nothing is written upon it that has not been written by their life. It is the embodiment, not of a sentiment, but of a history.

Never attempt to murder a man who is committing suicide.

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.

War is only a sort of dramatic representation, a sort of dramatic symbol of a thousand forms of duty. I fancy that it is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shooting at you.

Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.

The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.

We shall not, I believe, be obliged to alter our policy of watchful waiting.

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

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.

Leadership does not always wear the harness of compromise.

A living thing is born.

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

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

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

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

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

Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at.

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.

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

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

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.

Only peace between equals can last.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.