Woodrow Wilson Quotes

You are here to enrich the world and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.

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

If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it.

We will presently find that we are not so far apart after all, that the points on which we differ are few and the points on which we agree are many, and that if we only have the patience and the candor and the desire to get together, we will get together.

The immortality of Thomas Jefferson does not lie in any one of his achievements, or in the series of his achievements, but in his attitude towards mankind and the conception which he sought to realize in action of the service owed by America to the rest of the world...Thomas Jefferson was a great leader of men because he understood and interpreted the spirits of men.

[Movies are] like writing history with lightning.

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

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 civilised 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 small groups of dominant men.

Golf is an ineffectual attempt to put an elusive ball into an obscure hole with implements ill-adopted to the purpose.

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. But we shall not be poor if we love liberty, because the nation that loves liberty truly sets every man free to do his best and be his best.

No one set of interests can safely be suffered to dominate the country.

Gossips are only sociologists upon a mean and petty scale.

The great malady of public life is cowardice. Most men are not untrue, but they are afraid. Most of the errors of public life, if my observation is to be trusted, come not because men are morally bad, but because they are afraid of somebody. God knows why they should be: it is generally shadows they are afraid of.

The sum of the whole matter is this, that our civilization cannot survive materially unless it be redeemed spiritually.

Perhaps it was providential that I was stricken down when I was. Had I kept my health I should have carried the League. Events have shown that the world was not ready for it. It would have been a failure. Countries like France and Italy are unsympathetic with such an organisation. Time and sinister happenings may eventually convince them that some such scheme is required. It may not be my scheme. It may be some other. I see now, however, that my plan was premature. The world was not ripe for it.