Woodrow Wilson Quotes (144 Quotes)

America was established not to create wealth but to realize a vision, to realize an ideal - to discover and maintain liberty among men.

It is the object of learning, not only to satisfy the curiosity and perfect the spirits of ordinary men, but also to advance civilization.

Generally young men are regarded as radicals. This is a popular misconception. The most conservative persons I ever met are college undergraduates. The radicals are the men past middle life.

I am not sure that it is of the first importance that you should be happy. Many an unhappy man has been of deep service to himself and to the world.

We have not given science too big a place in our education, but we have made a perilous mistake in giving it too great a preponderance in method in every other branch of study.

There are blessed intervals when I forget by one means or another that I am President of the United States.

I am not one of those who believe that a great 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.

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.

You cannot become thorough Americans if you think of yourselves in groups. America does not consist of groups. A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American.

You cannot be friends upon any other terms than upon the terms of equality.

There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power not organized rivalries, but an organized peace.

Every great man of business has got somewhere a touch of the idealist in him.

The question of armaments, whether on land or sea, is the most immediately and intensely practical question connected with the future fortunes of nations and of mankind.

Business underlies everything in our national life, including our spiritual life. Witness the fact that in the Lord's Prayer, the first petition is for daily bread. No one can worship God or love his neighbor on an empty stomach.

It must be peace without victory only a peace between equals can last.

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

No one who has read official documents needs to be told how easy it is to conceal the essential truth under the apparently candid and all- disclosing phrases of a voluminous and particularizing report ....

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

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

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

Never attempt to murder a man who is committing suicide.

Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end and prefer the interest of mankind to any narrow interest of their own

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 history of liberty is a history of resistance.

I will not speak with disrespect of the Republican Party. I always speak with respect of the past.

I believe in democracy, because it releases the energies of every human being.

By 'radical,' I understand one who goes too far; by 'conservative,' one who does not go far enough; by 'reactionary,' one who won't go at all.

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

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

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.

It is like writing history with lightning and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.

I would rather fail in a cause that will ultimately triumph than triumph in a cause that will ultimately fail.

We grow by our dreams.

You cannot, in human experience, rush into the light. You have to go through the twilight into the broadening day before the noon comes and the full sun is upon the landscape.

There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it it does not need to convince others by force that it is right

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.

Today's greatest labor-saving device is tomorrow.

No man has ever risen to the real stature of spiritual manhood until he has found that it is finer to serve somebody else than it is to serve himself.

The success of a party means little more than that the Nation is using the party for a large and definite purpose. It seeks to use and interpret a change in its own plans and point of view.

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

To do things today exactly the way you did them yesterday saves thinking

THE SUM OF THE WHOLE MATTER IS THIS OUR CIVILIZATION CANNOT SURVIVE MATERIALLY UNLESS IT BE REDEEMED SPIRITUALLY.

I have come slowly into possession of such powers as I have. I receive the opinions of my day. I do not conceive them. But I receive them into a vivid mind.

The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation.