Woodrow Wilson Quotes

“Music says nothing to the reason: it is a kind of closely structured nonsense.”

“The fewer the desires, the more peace.”

“No nation is fit to sit in judgement upon any other nation.”

“The facts of the case will always have the better of [an] argument.”

“Princeton is no longer a thing for Princeton men to please themselves with. Princeton is a thing with which Princeton men must satisfy the country.”

“We are in the presence of a new organization of society. Our life has broken away from the past.”

“...We are intensely proud of their noble record and are glad to have had the whole world see how irresistible they are in their might when a cause which America holds dear is at stake. The whole nation has reason to be proud of them.”

“America cannot be an ostrich with its head in the sand.”

“No task, rightly done, is truly private. It is part of the world s work.”

“A sure sign of an amateur is too much detail to compensate for too little life.”

“Life does not consist in thinking, it consists in acting.”

“All the extraordinary men I have ever known were chiefly extraordinary in their own estimation.”

“No student knows his subject: the most he knows is where and how to find out the things he does not know”

“Our object now, as then, is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power, and to set up among the really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth insure the observance of those principles.”

“Have you thought of the sufferings of Armenia? You poured out your money to help succor the Armenians after they suffered; now set your strength so that they shall never suffer again.”

“My dream is that as the years go by and the world knows more and more of America, itwill turn to America for those moral inspirations that lie at the basis of all freedomthat America will come into the full light of the day when all shall know that she puts human rights above all other rights, and that her flag is the flag not only of America but of humanity.”

“If I cannot retain my moral influence over a man except by occasionally knocking him down, if that is the only basis upon which he will respect me, then for the sake of his soul I have got occasionally to knock him down.”

“The natural man inevitably rebels against mathematics, a mild form of torture that could only be learned by painful processes of drill.”

“My dream of politics all my life has been that it is the common business, that it is something we owe to each other to understand and discuss with absolute frankness.”

“America is the place where you cannot kill your government by killing the men who conduct it.”

“I have always been among those who believed that the greatest freedom of speech was the greatest safety, because if a man is a fool, the best thing to do is to encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking.”

“Today, supremely, it behooves us to remember that a nation shall be saved by the power that sleeps in its own bosom; or by none; shall be renewed in hope, in confidence, in strength by waters welling up from its own sweet, perennial springs. Not from above; not by patronage of its aristocrats. The flower does not bear the root, but the root the flower.”

“I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow.”

“I want to re-echo my hope that we may all work together for a great peace as distinguished from a mean peace.”

“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.”