Top 468 Quotes & Sayings by Woodrow Wilson - Page 6

Energy in a nation is like sap in a tree; it rises from bottom up.

The firm basis of government is justice, not pity.

In the last analysis, my fellow country men, as we in America would be the first to claim, a people are responsible for the acts of their government.

You have just taken an oath of allegiance to the United States. Of allegiance to whom? Of allegiance to no one, unless it be God. Certainly not of allegiance to those who temporarily represent this great government. You have taken an oath of allegiance to a great ideal, to a great body of principles, to a great hope of the human race.

I have sometimes heard men say politics must have nothing to do with business, and I have often wished that business had nothing to do with politics.

I firmly believe in Divine Providence. Without belief in Providence I think I should go crazy. Without God the world would be a maze without a clue.

The success of a party means little except when the nation is using that party for a large and definite purpose. No one can mistake the purpose for which the nation now seeks to use the Democratic party. It seeks to use it to interpret a change in its own plans and point of view.

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

I am one who fights without a knack of hoping confidentlysimply a Scotch-Irishman who will not be conquered.

Some of us let these great dreams die, but others nourish and protect them; nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light...

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

The greatest and truest models for all oratorsis Demosthenes. One who has not studied deeply and constantly all the great speeches of the great Athenian, is not prepared to speak in public. Only as the constant companion of Demosthenes, Burke, Fox, Canning and Webster, can we hope to become orators.

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.

Tolerance is an admirable intellectual gift; but it is of little worth in politics.

Uncompromising thought is the luxury of the closeted recluse.

The presidential office is not a rosewater affair. This is an office in which a man must put on his war paint.

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

Settlements may be temporary, but the action of the nations in the interest of peace and justice must be permanent. We can set up permanent processes. We may not be able to set up permanent decisions.

I'm a vague, conjunctured personality, more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles.

Reality is what I see, not what you see.

We are participants, whether we would or not, in the life of the world.... We are partners with the rest. What affects mankind isinevitably our affair as well as the nations of Europe and Asia.

The legislator must be in advance of his age. Across the mind of the statesman flash ever and anon the brilliant, though partial, intimations of future events.... Something which is more than fore-sight and less than prophetic knowledge marks the statesman a peculiar being among his contemporaries.

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.

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.

Once lead this people into war, and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight, you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fiber of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street.

There is here a great melting pot in which we must compound a precious metal. That metal is the metal of nationality.

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

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

No peace can last, or ought to last, which does not recognize and accept the principle that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that no right anywhere exists to hand peoples from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were property.

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

If you would be a leader of men, you must lead your own generation, not the next.

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

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

All things come to him who waits

My best training came from my father.

The law that will work is merely the summing up in legislative form of the moral judgment that the community has already reached.

Such a mind we must desire to see in a woman,--a mind that stirs without irritating you, that arouses but does not belabour, amuses and yet subtly instructs.

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.

The interesting and inspiring thing about America is that she asks nothing for herself except what she has a right to ask for humanity itself.

But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts

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

The nation's honor is dearer than the nation's comfort.

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

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.

If you would be a leader of men you must lead your own generation, not the next. Your playing must be good now, while the play ison the boards and the audience in the seats.... It will not get you the repute of a good actor to have excellencies discovered in you afterwards.

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.

That is Gladstone, the greatest statesman that ever lived. I intend to be a statesman, too.

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.

From the dim morning hours of history when the father was king and priest down to this modern time of history's high noon when nations stand forth full grown and self-governed, the law of coherence and continuity in political development has suffered no serious breach.

They [the children] live in a world of delightful imagination; they pursue persons and objects that never existed; they make an Argosy laden with gold out of a floating butterfly,--and these stupid [grown-up people] try to translate these things into uninteresting facts.

To think that I, the son ofthe manse, should be able to help restore the Holy Land to its people.

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

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.

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.

I confess my belief in the common man.... The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.... The man who is in the melee knows what blows are being struck and what blood is being drawn.

One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty councils. The thing to do is to supply light and not heat. Ay any rate, if it is heat it ought to be white heat and not sputter, because sputtering heat is apt to spread the fire. There ought, if there is any heat at all, to be that warmth of the heart which makes every man thrust aside his own personal feeling, his own personal interest, and take thought of the welfare and benefit of others.

I believe in human liberty as I believe in the wine of life. There is no salvation for men in the pitiful condescension of industrial masters. Guardians have no place in a land of freemen.

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

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.

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.