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Woodrow Wilson
151 quotes
“I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1913 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Address on Latin American Policy before the Southern Commercial Congress Mobile, Alabama (27 October 1913)
“I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1913 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Statement to British envoy William Tyrrell explaining his policy on Mexico (November 1913)
“The way to stop financial joy-riding is to arrest the chauffeur, not the automobile.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1914 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Atlanta Constitution (14 January 1914), p. 1
“I not only use all the brains I have, but all I can borrow, and I have borrowed a lot since I read it to you first.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1914 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to the National Press Club (20 March 1914)
“There are blessed intervals when I forget by one means or another that I am President of the United States.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1914 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to the National Press Club (20 March 1914)
“The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name...We must be impartial in thought as well as in action.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1914 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Message to the Senate (19 August 1914)
“Segregation is not humiliating but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen. If your organization goes out and tells the colored people of the country that it is a humiliation, they will so regard it, but if you do not tell them so, and regard it rather as a benefit, they will regard it the same. The only harm that will come will be if you cause them to think it is a humiliation... If this organization is ever to have another hearing before me it must have another spokesman. Your manner offends me...”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1914 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Defending the re-segregation of federal offices, in Conference with members of the National Association for Equal Rights (November 1914)
“You deal in the raw material of opinion, and, if my convictions have any validity, opinion ultimately governs the world.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1915 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Address to the Associated Press (20 April 1915)
“No nation is fit to sit in judgment upon any other nation.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1915 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in New York City (20 April 1915)
“There is such thing as a man being too proud to fight.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1915 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Address to Foreign-Born Citizens (10 May 1915)
“No man that does not see visions will ever realize any high hope or undertake any high enterprise.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1915 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Citizens of Foreign Birth”, Philadelphia (10 May 1915)
“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.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1915 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Citizens of Foreign Birth]”, (10 May 1915)
“We are constantly thinking of the great war … which which we think to-day as a war which saved the Union, and it did indeed save the Union, but it was a war that did a great deal more than that. It created in this country what had never existed before — a national consciousness. It was not the salvation of the Union, it was the rebirth of the Union.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1915 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Memorial Day Address (31 May 1915)
“The flag is the embodiment, not of sentiment, but of history. It represents the experiences made by men and women, the experiences of those who do and live under that flag.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1915 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Address (14 June 1915)
“There is a very great thrill to be had from the memories of the American Revolution, but the American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation, and the duty laid upon us by that beginning is the duty of bringing the things then begun to a noble triumph of completion.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1915 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the Spirit of America”, Address to Daughters of the American Revoltion (11 October 1915)
“We have stood apart, studiously neutral.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1915 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Message to Congress (7 December 1915)
“Politics I conceive to be nothing more than the science of the ordered progress of society along the lines of greatest usefulness and convenience to itself.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: What is Pan-Americanism?”, Address to Pan American Scientific Congress (6 January 1916)
“Do you never stop to reflect just what it is that America stands for? If she stands for one thing more than another, it is for the sovereignty of self-governing peoples, and her example, her assistance, her encouragement, has thrilled two continents in this Western World with all the fine impulses which have built up human liberty on both sides of the water.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech on Military Preparedness, Pittsburgh (29 January 1916)
“We want the spirit of America to be efficient; we want American character to be efficient; we want American character to display itself in what I may, perhaps, be allowed to call spiritual efficiency—clear, disinterested thinking and fearless action along the right lines of thought. America is not anything if it consists of each of us. It is something only if it consists of all of us; and it can consist of all of us only as our spirits are banded together in a common enterprise.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech on Military Preparedness, Pittsburgh (29 January 1916)
“One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty counsels. The thing to do is to supply light and not heat.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech on Military Preparedness, Pittsburgh (29 January 1916)
“Some men who are not real men love other things about themselves, but the real man believes that his honor is dearer than his life; and a nation is merely all of us put together, and the nation's honor is dearer than the nation's comfort and the nation's peace and the nation's life itself.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in Cleveland (January 1916)
“America cannot be an ostrich with its head in the sand.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech at Des Moines (1 February 1916)
“There is a price which is too great to pay for peace, and that price can be put in one word. One cannot pay the price of self-respect.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Des Moines Iowa speech (1 February 1916), on "The Westerm Preparedness Tour
“The only excuse that America can ever have for the assertion of her physical force is that she asserts it in behalf of the interests of humanity.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to the Daughters of the American Revolution at Memorial Continental Hall in Washington, D.C. on April 17, 1916
“I have long enjoyed the friendship and companionship of Republicans, because I am by instinct a teacher and I would like to teach them something.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to the World's Salesmanship Congress (10 July 1916)
“If you want to make enemies, try to change something.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Address to World's Salesmanship Congress, Detroit (10 July 1916)
“Loyalty means nothing unless it has at its heart the absolute principle of self-sacrifice.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Address on American Spirit, Washington (13 July 1916)
“I am inclined to follow the course suggested by a friend of mine who says that he has always followed the rule never to murder a man who is committing suicide, and clearly this misdirected gentleman is committing suicide slowly but surely.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1916 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Bernard Baruch (19 August 1916), PWW 38:51
“The question upon which the whole future peace and policy of the world depends is this: Is the present war a struggle for a just and secure peace, or only for a new balance of power? If it be only a struggle for a new balance of power, who will guarantee, who can guarantee, the stable equilibrium of the new arrangement? Only a tranquil Europe can be a stable Europe. There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Address to the Senate (22 January 1917)
“It must be a peace without victory... Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor's terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Address to the Senate (22 January 1917)
“A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Statement on the successful filibuster by anti-war Senators against a bill to arm merchant ships (4 March 1917)
“Once lead this people into war and they will forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Conversation with Frank Irving Cobb before asking Congress to declare war (2 April 1917). Attributed in Cobb of "The World," a leader of liberalism, by Cobb and Heaton, 1924, p. 270
“The supreme test of the nation has come. We must all speak, act, and serve together!”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Proclamation to the American People (15 April 1917)
“I can imagine no greater disservice to the country than to establish a system of censorship that would deny to the people of a free republic like our own their indisputable right to criticise their own public officials. While exercising the great powers of the office I hold, I would regret in a crisis like the one through which we are now passing to lose the benefit of patriotic and intelligent criticism.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Arthur Brisbane (April 25, 1917); reported in Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson, Life and Letters (1946), vol. 6, p. 36
“I have read it with the deepest appreciation of Mr. Herron's singular insight into all the elements of a complicated situation and into my own motives and purposes.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Mitchell Kennerley about the book Woodrow Wilson and the World's Peace, October 1, 1917
“Well, nothing was ever done so systematically as nothing is being done now.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Address to fleet officers (August 11, 1917), quoted in Joseph P. Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson As I Know Him (1921), p. 297
“Friendship is the only cement that will ever hold the world together.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1918 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Red Cross Speech, New York (18 May 1918)
“Conservatism is the policy of making no changes and consulting your grandmother when in doubt.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) said by 1924 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Attributed by Raymond B. Fosdick in Report of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, 1963, p. 49
“The Germans are really a stupid people. They always do the wrong thing. They always did the wrong thing during the war. They don't understand human nature. This is the most tactless speech I have ever heard. It will set the whole world against them.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1908 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Remarks to George Riddell (7 May 1919), J. M. McEwen (ed.), The Riddell Diaries 1908–1923 (1986), p. 275. The German plenipotentiary at the presentation of the Treaty of Versailles, Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, unexpe…
“America is the place where you can not kill your Government by killing the men who conduct it. The only way you can kill government in America is by making the men and women of America forget how to govern, and nobody can do that. They sometimes find the team a little difficult to drive, but they sooner or later whip it into harness.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1919 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Address at Opera House, Helena Montana" (September 11, 1919), in, Addresses of President Wilson (1919), p. 154.
“This war, in its inception was a commercial and industrial war. It was not a political war.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech at the Coliseum in St. Louis, Missouri, on the Peace Treaty and the League of Nations (5 September 1919), as published in "The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Authorized Edition) War and Peace: Presidential Mess…
“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.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech in Omaha, Nebraska (8 September 1919), as recorded in Addresses of President Wilson (1919), p. 75 and in "The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Authorized Edition) War and Peace: Presidential Messages, Addresses, …
“The seed of revolution is repression.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) first seen 1919 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 7th annual message to Congress (2 December 1919)
“In most parts of our country men work, not for themselves, not as partners in the old way in which they used to work, but generally as employees,—in a higher or lower grade,—of great corporations. There was a time when corporations played a very minor part in our business affairs, but now they play the chief part, and most men are the servants of corporations.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) said by 1924 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No country can afford to have its prosperity originated by a small controlling class. The treasury of America lies in those ambitions, those energies, that cannot be restricted to a special favored class. It depends upon the inventions of unknown men, upon the originations of unknown men, upon the ambitions of unknown men. Every country is renewed out of the ranks of the unknown, not out of the ranks of those already famous and powerful and in control.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) said by 1924 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) said by 1924 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) said by 1924 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All that progressives ask or desire is permission — in an era when "development," "evolution," is the scientific word — to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) said by 1924 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No student knows his subject: the most he knows is where and how to find out the things he does not know.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) said by 1924 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So, our honest politicians and our honorable corporation heads owe it to their reputations to bring their activities out into the open.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) said by 1924 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source