Woodrow Wilson

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.

There is no question what the roll of honor in America is. The roll of honor consists of the names of men who have squared their conduct by ideals of duty.

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.

One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty counsels. The thing to do is to supply light and not heat.

There will be no greater burden on our generation than to organize the forces of liberty in our time in order to make our quest of a new freedom for America.

That a peasant may become king does not render the kingdom democratic.

This little world, this little state, this little commonwealth of our own....

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

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

A little group of wilful men reflecting no opinion but their own have rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible.

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.

Caution is the confidential agent of selfishness.

My own ideals for the university are those of a genuine democracy and serious scholarship. These two, indeed, seem to go together.

Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned. They are not units but fractions.

We ought to regard ourselves and to act as socialists—believers in the wholesomeness and beneficence of the body politic.

We set this nation up ... to vindicate the rights of man. We did not name any differences between one race and another. We opened our gates to all the world and said: "Let all men who want to be free come to us and they will be welcome."

What we seek is the reign of law, based upon the consent of the governed and sustained by the organized opinion of mankind.

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

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.

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.

Would that we could do something, at once dignified and effective, to knock Mr. Bryan once and for all into a cocked hat.

The light that shined upon the summit now seems almost to shine at our feet.

The true shepherd of his flock, the majesty of whose spiritual authority awed even the unscrupulous enemy.

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.

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.

Open covenants of peace openly arrived at

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.

A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.

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.

Property as compared with humanity, as compared with the red blood in the American people, must take second place, not first place.

He was no specialist except in the relation of things.... He took most of his materials at second hand.... But no matter who mined the gold, the image and superscription are his.

I want to re-echo my hope that we may all work together for a great peace as distinguished from a mean peace.

Where the great force lies, there must be the sanction of peace.

Gentlemen, I had hoped you might emulate your Saxon forefathers, who thought it not creditable to be unprepared for anything.

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

He is a friend of all just men and a lover of the right; and he knows more than how to talk about the right—he knows how to set it forward in the face of its enemies.

We are constantly thinking of the great war ... which saved 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.

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

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 in its sweeping processes of change and settlement.

Once lead this people into war and they will forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.

He would have been wise, perhaps, without her, but he would not have been wise so delightfully.

The method of political science ... is the interpretation of life; its instrument is insight, a nice understanding of subtle, unformulated conditions.

A man may be defeated by his own secondary successes.

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.

My father did enough of it in his lifetime to answer for both of us.

We have beaten the living, but we cannot fight the dead.

Tell me what is right and I will fight for it.

The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.

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

Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American.... America is the only idealistic nation in the world.