Woodrow Wilson: Trending quotes

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Woodrow Wilson: 312 quotes32 likes

“We are constantly thinking of the great war … which which we think to-day as a war which saved the Union, and it did indeed save 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.”

Woodrow Wilson

Memorial Day Address (31 May 1915)
1910s

“Prosperity … is necessarily the first theme of a political campaign.”

Woodrow Wilson

Campaign speech, 1912, PWW 25:99
1910s

“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

“Citizens of Foreign Birth]”, (10 May 1915)
1910s

“The Senate of the United States has been both extravagantly praised and unreasonably disparaged, according to the predisposition and temper of its various critics… The truth is, in this case as in so many others, something quite commonplace and practical. The Senate is just what the mode of its election and the conditions of public life in this country make it.”

Woodrow Wilson Congressional Government

Congressional Government, A Study in American Politics (1885; republished 1981), chapter 4, p. 135 (1981)
1880s

“I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it.”

Woodrow Wilson

Speech in Omaha, Nebraska (8 September 1919), as recorded in Addresses of President Wilson (1919), p. 75 and in "The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Authorized Edition) War and Peace: Presidential Messages, Addresses, and Public Papers (1917-1924) Volume II Page 36; Wilson later used this phrase in his address in Pueblo, Colorado, in what has been called his League of Nations Address (25 September 1919)[Note: this phrase is not in Wilson's address in Pueblo, Colorado (25 September 1919). He made a much softer statement making the inevitability of a future war without the League implicit rather than explicit.]
1910s

“The highest and best form of efficiency is the spontaneous cooperation of a free people.”

Woodrow Wilson

As quoted in American Industry at War : A Report of the War Industries Board (March 1921) by Bernard Baruch
1920s and later

“I yield to no one precedence in love for the South. But because I love the South, I rejoice in the failure of the Confederacy.”

Woodrow Wilson

Essay on John Bright, Virginia University Magazine, 19:354-370 http://books.google.com/books?id=qP2eeyB3QkYC&pg=PA73&dq=%22rejoice+in+the+failure+of+the+Confederacy%22 (March 1880) 1880s

“All that progressives ask or desire is permission — in an era when "development," "evolution," is the scientific word — to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.”

Woodrow Wilson

Section II: “What Is Progress?”, p. 48 http://books.google.com/books?id=MW8SAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA48&dq=%22All+that+progressives+ask%22 1910s, The New Freedom (1913)

“There is a very great thrill to be had from the memories of the American Revolution, but the American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation, and the duty laid upon us by that beginning is the duty of bringing the things then begun to a noble triumph of completion.”

Woodrow Wilson

“On the Spirit of America” http://books.google.com/books?id=w0IOAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA122, Address to Daughters of the American Revoltion (11 October 1915) 1910s

“The principles on which to base a science of administration for America, must be principles which have democratic policy very much at heart.”

Woodrow Wilson

1880s, "The Study of Administration," 1887

“[Reconstruction was detestable] not because the Republican Party was dreaded but because the dominance of an ignorant and inferior race was justly dreaded.”

Woodrow Wilson

As quoted in Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism, Ronald J. Pestritto, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005, p. 45. Came from Wilson’s marginal notes on one of his manuscripts.
1920s and later

“I sat next to the Duchess at tea.
It was just as I feared it would be:
Her rumblings abdominal
Were truly phenomenal,
And everyone thought it was me!”

Woodrow Wilson

A variation with "thought" instead of feared and "abominable" instead of phenomenal is reported as a misattribution in Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions (1989), p. 132
Misattributed

“The great voice of America does not come from the seats of learning, but in a murmur from the hills and the woods and the farms and the factories and the mills, rolling on and gaining volume until it comes to us the voice from the homes of the common men. Do these murmurs come into the corridors of the university? I have not heard them.”

Woodrow Wilson

Address to Princeton University alumni, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (April 17, 1910); reported in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link (1975), vol. 20, p. 365
1910s

“The seed of revolution is repression.”

Woodrow Wilson

7th annual message to Congress http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29560 (2 December 1919) 1910s

“We are not put into this world to sit still and know; we are put into it to act.
It is true that in order to learn men must for a little while withdraw from action, must seek some quiet place of remove from the bustle of affairs, where their thoughts may run clear and tranquil, and the heats of business be for the time put off; but that cloistered refuge is no place to dream in.”

Woodrow Wilson

“ Princeton for the Nation's Service http://infoshare1.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/mudd/online_ex/wilsonline/4dn8nsvc.html”, Inaugural address as President of Princeton (25 October 1902); this speech is different from his 1896 speech of the same title. 1900s

“Gossips are only sociologists upon a mean and petty scale.”

Woodrow Wilson

On Being Human http://books.google.com/books?id=hp0RAAAAMAAJ&q=&quot;Gossips+are+only+sociologists+upon+a+mean+and+petty+scale&quot;&pg=PA326#v=onepage, The Atlantic Monthly, (September, 1897) 1920s and later

“I can imagine no greater disservice to the country than to establish a system of censorship that would deny to the people of a free republic like our own their indisputable right to criticise their own public officials. While exercising the great powers of the office I hold, I would regret in a crisis like the one through which we are now passing to lose the benefit of patriotic and intelligent criticism.”

Woodrow Wilson

Letter to Arthur Brisbane (April 25, 1917); reported in Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson, Life and Letters (1946), vol. 6, p. 36
1910s

“In most parts of our country men work, not for themselves, not as partners in the old way in which they used to work, but generally as employees,—in a higher or lower grade,—of great corporations. There was a time when corporations played a very minor part in our business affairs, but now they play the chief part, and most men are the servants of corporations.”

Woodrow Wilson

Section I: “The Old Order Changeth”, p. 5 http://books.google.com/books?id=MW8SAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA5&dq=%22In%20most%20parts%20of%20our%20country%22 1910s, The New Freedom (1913)

“What is at at stake now is the peace of the world. What we are striving for is a new international order based upon broad and universal principles of right and justice, -- no mere peace of shreds and patches.”

Woodrow Wilson

1910s, Address to Congress: Analyzing German and Austrian Peace Utterances (1918)

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

Woodrow Wilson

“The Road Away from Revolution”, Atlantic Monthly 132:146 (August 1923). Reprinted in PWW 68:395
1920s and later