Woodrow Wilson Quotes

It would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.

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.

Friendship is the only cement that will ever hold the world together.

Adventurers swarmed out of the North to cozen, beguile, and use them. These men were ‘carpet baggers’… They gained the confidence of the negroes, obtained for themselves the most lucrative offices, and lived upon the public treasury, public contracts, and their easy control of affairs… For the Negroes there was nothing but occasional allotments of abandon or forfeited land, the pay of petty offices, a per diem allowances as members of the conventions and the state legislatures which their new masters made business for, or the wages of servants in the various offices of administration. Their ignorance and credulity made them easy dupes.

If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it; what we have to determine now is whether we are big enough, whether we are men enough, whether we are free enough, to take possession again of the government which is our own.

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...

In fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same. They both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members. Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals.

You deal in the raw material of opinion, and, if my convictions have any validity, opinion ultimately governs the world.

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.

[Movies are] like writing history with lightning.

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.

Armed neutrality, it now appears, is impracticable.

We can afford to exercise the self-restraint of a really great nation which realizes its own strength and scorns to misuse it.

No man can rationally live, worship, or love his neighbour on an empty stomach.

Generally young men are regarded as radicals. This is a popular misconception. The most conservative persons I ever met are college undergraduates. The radicals are the men past middle life.