Woodrow Wilson > Quotes

“I not only use all the brains that I have, but all I can borrow.”
― 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

“You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.”
― Woodrow Wilson

“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world - no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.”
― Woodrow Wilson

“The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.”
― Woodrow Wilson

“If you want to make enemies, try to change something.”
― Woodrow Wilson

“Friendship is the only cement that will ever hold the world together.”
― Woodrow Wilson

“You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world.”
― Woodrow Wilson

“A conservative is a man who sits and thinks, mostly sits.”
― Woodrow Wilson

“We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”
― Woodrow Wilson

“Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of the government. The history of government is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of government, not the increase of it.”
― Woodrow Wilson

“We are citizens of the world. The tragedy of our times is that we do not know this.”
― 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

“You have the greatest soul, the noblest nature, the sweetest, most loving heart I have ever known, and my love, my reverence, my admiration for you, you have increased in one evening as I should have thought only a lifetime of intimate, loving association could have increased them. You are more wonderful and lovely in my eyes than you ever were before; and my pride and joy and gratitude that you should love me with such a perfect love are beyond all expression, except in some great poem which I cannot write.”
― Woodrow Wilson

“I come from the South and I know what war is, for I have seen its terrible wreckage and ruin. It is easy for me as President to declare war. I do not have to fight, and neither do the gentlemen on the Hill who now clamor for it. It is some poor farmer's boy, or the son of some poor widow - who will have to do the fighting and dying.”
― 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

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

“We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers. They see things in the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter's evening. Some of us let these dreams die, but others nourish and protect them; nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light which comes always to those who sincerely hope that their dreams will come true.”
― Woodrow Wilson

“We forget that there is much more patriotism in having the audacity to differ from the majority than in running before the crowd; we forget that in the resistance of the minority some of the biggest things in our own history have been accomplished, and the man who looks on the Stars and Stripes and doesn't hold a right to say nay to his neighbor, even if the neighbor is of the larger party, has forgotten the history of his country.”
― Woodrow Wilson

“The seed of revolution is repression.”
― Woodrow Wilson

“War isn’t declared in the name of God; it is a human affair entirely.”
― Woodrow Wilson

“Only peace between equal can last.”
― Woodrow Wilson

“[o]f course like every other man of intelligence and education I do believe in organic evolution. It surprises me that at this late date such questions should be raised.”
― Woodrow Wilson

“The man swimming against the stream knows the strenth of it.”
― Woodrow Wilson

“Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.”
― Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom

“When men take up arms to set other men free, there is something sacred and holy in the warfare.”
― Woodrow Wilson

“Some people have a large circle of friends while others have only friends that they like.”
― Woodrow Wilson

“You are not here merely to making a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement.”
― Woodrow Wilson

“It is ... particularly true of constitutional government that its atmosphere is opinion .... It does not remain fixed in any unchanging form, but grows with the growth and is altered with the change of the nation's needs and purposes.”
― Woodrow Wilson

“If a dog will not come to you after he has looked you in the face, you should go home and examine your conscience.”~”
― Woodrow Wilson

“The President is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can. His capacity will set the limit; and if Congress be overborne by him, it will be no fault of the makers of the Constitution, – it will be from no lack of constitutional powers on its part, but only because the President has the nation behind him, and the Congress has not.”

“The chief instrumentality by which the law of the Constitution has been extended to cover the facts of national development has of course been judicial interpretation, – the decisions of the courts. The process of formal amendment of the Constitution was made so difficult by provisions of the Constitution itself that it has seldom been feasible to use it; and the difficulty of formal amendment has undoubtedly made the courts more liberal, not to say lax, in their interpretation than they would otherwise have been. The whole business of adaptation has been theirs, and they have undertaken it with open minds, sometimes even with boldness and a touch of audacity...”


“The old theory of the sovereignty of the States, which used so to engage our passions, has lost its vitality. The war between the States established at least this principle, that the federal government is, through its courts, the final judge of its own powers... We are impatient of state legislatures because they seem to us less representative of the thoughtful opinion of the country than Congress is. We know that our legislatures do not think alike, but we are not sure that our people do not think alike...”
― Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States

“No nation is fit to sit in judgment upon any other nation.”
― 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

“We should not only use all the brains we have but all that we can borrow.”
― Woodrow Wilson

“How is the schoolmaster, the nation, to know which boy needs the whipping?

[In an argument for parliamentarianism in the USA]”
― Woodrow Wilson, Congressional Government

“Freindship is the only cement that will ever hold the world together.”
― Woodrow Wilson