Quotes by Woodrow Wilson


I would rather lose in a cause that will someday win, than win in a cause that will someday lose.
– Woodrow Wilson
A conservative is a man who just sits and thinks, mostly sits.
– Woodrow Wilson
A conservative is someone who makes no changes and consults his grandmother when in doubt.
– Woodrow Wilson
Absolute identity with one's cause is the first and great condition of successful leadership.
– Woodrow Wilson
America is not anything if it consists of each of us. It is something only if it consists of all of us.
– Woodrow Wilson
America was established not to create wealth but to realize a vision, to realize an ideal - to discover and maintain liberty among men.
– Woodrow Wilson
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.
– Woodrow Wilson
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.
– Woodrow Wilson
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.
– Woodrow Wilson
Every man who takes office in Washington either grows or swells, and when I give a man an office, I watch him carefully to see whether he is growing or swelling.
– Woodrow Wilson
Golf is a game in which one endeavors to control a ball with implements ill adapted for the purpose.
– Woodrow Wilson
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
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
I would rather lose in a cause that will some day win, than win in a cause that will some day lose.
– Woodrow Wilson
If a dog will not come to you after having looked you in the face, you should go home and examine your conscience.
– Woodrow Wilson
If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.
– Woodrow Wilson
If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it.
– Woodrow Wilson
If you think too much about being re-elected, it is very difficult to be worth re-electing.
– Woodrow Wilson
If you want to make enemies, try to change something.
– Woodrow Wilson
Liberty has never come from Government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it... The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.
– Woodrow Wilson
Never attempt to murder a man who is committing suicide.
– Woodrow Wilson
One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty counsels. The thing to do is to supply light and not heat.
– Woodrow Wilson
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
Prosperity is necessarily the first theme of a political campaign.
– Woodrow Wilson
The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation.
– Woodrow Wilson
The ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people.
– Woodrow Wilson
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
The history of liberty is a history of resistance.
– Woodrow Wilson
The seed of revolution is repression.
– Woodrow Wilson
There are blessed intervals when I forget by one means or another that I am President of the United States.
– Woodrow Wilson
There can be no equality or opportunity if men and women and children be not shielded in their lives from the consequences of great industrial and social processes which they cannot alter, control, or singly cope with.
– Woodrow Wilson
There is no higher religion than human service. To work for the common good is the greatest creed.
– Woodrow Wilson
Uncompromising thought is the luxury of the closeted recluse.
– Woodrow Wilson
...it is as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shooting at you.
– Woodrow Wilson
America lives in the heart of every man everywhere who wishes to find a region where he will be free to work out his destiny as he chooses.
– Woodrow Wilson
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.
– Woodrow Wilson
No man can sit down and withhold his hands from the warfare against wrong and get peace from his acquiescence.
– Woodrow Wilson
You are not here merely to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world. You impoverish yourself if you forget this errand.
– Woodrow Wilson
Once lead this people into war and they will forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.
– Woodrow Wilson
Power consists in one's capacity to link his will with the purpose of others, to lead by reason and a gift of cooperation.
– Woodrow Wilson
No nation is fit to sit in judgement upon any other nation.
– Woodrow Wilson
There is such a thing as a 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.
– Woodrow Wilson
The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.
– Woodrow Wilson
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.
– Woodrow Wilson
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.
– Woodrow Wilson
There is little for the great part of the history of the world except the bitter tears of pity and the hot tears of wrath.
– Woodrow Wilson
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.
– Woodrow Wilson
The method of political science is the interpretation of life its instrument is insight, a nice understanding of subtle, unformulated conditions.
– Woodrow Wilson
The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.
– Woodrow Wilson
The awakening of the people of China to the possibilities under free government is the most significant, if not the most momentous, event of our generation.
– Woodrow Wilson
Neutrality is a negative word. It does not express what America ought to feel. We are not trying to keep out of trouble we are trying to preserve the foundations on which peace may be rebuilt.
– Woodrow Wilson
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.
– Woodrow Wilson
It is like writing history with lightning and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.
– Woodrow Wilson
Interest does not tie nations together it sometimes separates them. But sympathy and understanding does unite them.
– Woodrow Wilson
I will not speak with disrespect of the Republican Party. I always speak with respect of the past.
– Woodrow Wilson
I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow.
– Woodrow Wilson
Democracy is not so much a form of government as a set of principles.
– Woodrow Wilson
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