Top 468 Quotes & Sayings by Woodrow Wilson - Page 7

America is the only idealistic nation in the world.

The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickenswith the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.

I have rather a strange objection to talking from the back platform of a train.... It changes too often. It moves around and shifts its ground too often. I like a platform that stays put.

I believe very profoundly in an over-ruling Providence, and I do not fear that any real plans can be thrown off the track. It maynot be intended that I shall be President--but that would not break my heart.

Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at.

...it would be a mistake...to ascribe to Roman legal conceptions an undivided sway over the development of law and institutions during the Middle Ages... The Laws of Moses as well as the laws of Rome contributed suggestions and impulse to the men and institutions which were to prepare the modern world; and if we could have but eyes to see... we should readily discover how very much besides religion we owe to the Jew.

America is not a mere body of traders; it is a body of free men. Our greatness is built upon our freedom - is moral, not material. We have a great ardor for gain; but we have a deep passion for the rights of man.

I have received delegations of working men who, apparently speaking with the utmost sincerity, have declared that they would regard it as a genuine hardship if they were deprived of their beer, for example.

Some Americans need hyphens in their names because only part of them has come over.

It is a protest against the way the world has worked. (explanation of Bolshevism)

Every one at the bottom of his heart cherishes vanity; even the toad thinks himself good-looking,--"rather tawny perhaps, but look at his eye!

I am so glad that I am young, so that I may give my youth to you.

Whatever may be said against the chewing of tobacco, this at least can be said of it, that it gives a man time to think between sentences.

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.

We grow through our dreams. All great men and women are dreamers. Some, however, allow their dreams to die. You should nurse your dreams and protect them through bad times and tough times to the sunshine and light which always come.

The literary gift is a very dangerous gift to possess if you are not telling the truth, and I would a great deal rather, for my part, have a man stumble in his speech than to feel he was so exceedingly smooth that he had better be watched both day and night.

There is a very holy and a very terrible isolation for the conscience of every man who seeks to read the destiny in affairs for others as well as for himself, for a nation as well as for individuals. That privacy no man can intrude upon. That lonely search of the spirit for the right perhaps no man can assist.

Here lies, in a "horizontal" position The "outside" case of Peter Pendulum, watch-maker. He departed this life "wound up" In hopes of being "taken in hand" by his Maker, And of being thoroughly "cleaned, repaired" and "set a-going" In the world to come.

There are times when words seem empty and only actions seem great. Such a time has come, and in the Providence of God America will once more have an opportunity to show the world that she was born to save mankind.

I used to be a lawyer, but now I am a reformed character.

Congress in session is Congress on public exhibition, whilst Congress in its committee-rooms is Congress at work.

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

There has been something crude and heartless and unfeeling in our haste to suceed and be great. Our thought has been 'Let every man look out for himself, let every generation look out for itself,' while we reared giant machinery which made it impossible that any but those who stood at the levers of control should have a chance to look out for themselves.

I do not want to live under a philanthropy. I do not want to be taken care of by the government.... We do not want a benevolent government. We want a free and a just government.

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.

It has become a people's war, and peoples of all sorts and races, of every degree of power and variety of fortune, are involved inits sweeping processes of change and settlement.

The commands of democracy are as imperative as its privileges and opportunities are wide and generous. Its compulsion is upon us.

The soul of me is very selfish. I have gone my way after a fashion that made me the center of the plan. And you who are so individual, who are so independent a spirit, whose soul is also a kingdom, have been so loyal, so forgiving, so self-sacrificing in your willingness to live my life. Nothing but love cold have accomplished so wonderful a thing.

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

There is no indispensable man.

There is one thing that the American people always rise to and extend their hand to and that is the truth of justice, and of liberty, and of peace. We have accepted that truth and we are going to led by itand through us the world, out into pastures of quietness and peace such as the world never dreamed of before.

There is no cause half so sacred as the cause of the people. There is no idea so uplifting as the idea of the service of humanity.

It is easier to move a cemetery than to change a curriculum.

Statesmen have to bend to the collective will of their peoples or be broken.

A powerful Navy we have always regarded as our proper and natural means of defense; and it has always been of defense that we have thought, never of aggression or of conquest. But who shall tell us now what sort of Navy to build? We shall take leave to be strong upon the seas, in the future as in the past; and there will be no thought of offense or provocation in that. Our ships are our natural bulwarks.

Opinion is the great, indeed the only coordinating force in our system.

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

The flag is a flag of liberty of opinion as well as of political liberty.

We didn't have another choice but to do what we did, if we wanted to be accepted, because we weren't counted as human beings.

Liberty cannot live apart from constitutional

While we are fighting for freedom, we must see, among other things, that labor is free.

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.

The profession I chose was politics; the profession I entered was law. I entered the one because I thought it would lead to the other.

The allied nations with the fullest concurrence of our government and people are agreed that in Palestine shall be laid the foundations of a Jewish Commonwealth.

Politics is a war of causes; a joust of principles.

Government is merely an attempt to express the conscience of everybody, the average conscience of the nation, in the rules that everybody is commanded to obey. That is all it is.

We never found a real model (for our vision).

The great war that broke so suddenly upon the world two years ago, and which has swept up within its flame so great a part of thecivilized world, has affected us very profoundly.... With its causes and its objects we are not concerned. The obscure fountains from which its stupendous flood has burst we are not interested to search for or explore.

And when they [American soldiers] came, they found fit comrades for their courage and their devotion. ... Joining hands with these, the men of America gave that greatest of all gifts, the gift of life and the gift of spirit.

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

Things get very lonely in Washington sometimes. The real voice of the great people of America sometimes sounds faint and distant in that strange city. You hear politics until you wish that both parties were smothered in their own gas.

One cannot pay the price of self-respect.

His [the President's] office is anything he has the sagacity and force to make it.

Man is much more than a 'rational being' and lives more by sympathies and impressions than by conclusions. It darkens his eyes and dries up the wells of his humanity to be forever in search of doctrine. We need wholesome, experiencing na­tures, I dare affirm, much more than we need sound reasoning.

I want the people to love me, but I suppose they never will.

There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight.

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.

Politics is a war of causes; a joust of principles. Government is too serious a matter to admit of meaningless courtesies.

My hope is ... that we may recover ... something of a renewal of that vision of the law with which men may be supposed to have started out with in the old days of the oracles, who communed with the intimations of divinity.

When you come into the presence of a leader of men, you know that you have come into the presence of fire - that it is best not uncautiously to touch that man - that there is something that makes it dangerous to cross him.