Woodrow Wilson: Trending quotes (page 7)

“Let me say again that I am not impugning the motives of the men in Wall Street. They may think that that is the best way to create prosperity for the country. When you have got the market in your hand, does honesty oblige you to turn the palm upside down and empty it? If you have got the market in your hand and believe that you understand the interest of the country better than anybody else, is it patriotic to let it go? I can imagine them using this argument to themselves.
The dominating danger in this land is not the existence of great individual combinations, — that is dangerous enough in all conscience, — but the combination of the combinations, — of the railways, the manufacturing enterprises, the great mining projects, the great enterprises for the development of the natural water-powers of the country, threaded together in the personnel of a series of boards of directors into a "community of interest" more formidable than any conceivable single combination that dare appear in the open.”

Woodrow Wilson

Section VIII: “Monopoly, Or Opportunity?”, p. 186 http://books.google.com/books?id=MW8SAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA186&dq=%22Let+me+say+again%22
1910s, The New Freedom (1913)

Men , Way , Imagination , Communication

“Congress in session is Congress on public exhibition, whilst Congress in its committee-rooms is Congress at work.”

Woodrow Wilson Congressional Government

Congressional Government, A Study in American Politics (1885; republished 1981), chapter 2, p. 69 (1981)
1880s

“We have stood apart, studiously neutral.”

Woodrow Wilson

Message to Congress (7 December 1915)
1910s

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

Woodrow Wilson

Statement on the successful filibuster by anti-war Senators against a bill to arm merchant ships (4 March 1917)
1910s

Men

“As a beauty I'm not a great star,
There are others more handsome by far,
But my face, I don't mind it,
Because I'm behind it —
Tis the people in front that I jar.”

Woodrow Wilson

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. 131-32; Boller and George note that Wilson was so fond of quoting this limerick that others thought he had written it. In fact, it was written by a minor poet named Anthony Euwer, and conveyed to Wilson by his daughter Eleanor.
Misattributed

People , Beauty , Star

“America cannot be an ostrich with its head in the sand.”

Woodrow Wilson

Speech at Des Moines (1 February 1916)
1910s

“I have not written a book since the campaign. I did not write this book at all. It is the result of the editorial literary skill of Mr. William Bayard Hale, who has put together here in their right sequences the more suggestive portions of my campaign speeches.
And yet it is not a book of campaign speeches. It is a discussion of a number of very vital subjects in the free form of extemporaneously spoken words. I have left the sentences in the form in which they were stenographically reported. I have not tried to alter the easy-going and often colloquial phraseology in which they were uttered from the platform, in the hope that they would seem the more fresh and spontaneous because of their very lack of pruning and recasting.”

Woodrow Wilson

Preface, p. vii http://books.google.com/books?id=MW8SAAAAIAAJ&pg=PP11&dq=%22I+have+not+written%22
1910s, The New Freedom (1913)

Books , Hope

“Conservatism is the policy of making no changes and consulting your grandmother when in doubt.”

Woodrow Wilson

Attributed by Raymond B. Fosdick in Report of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, 1963, p. 49 http://books.google.com/books?id=EqE8AAAAIAAJ&q=%22consulting+your+grandmother+when+in+doubt%22&dq=%22consulting+your+grandmother+when+in+doubt%22&hl=en&ei=fJ-HTJ33MYL58AaTqZyOAg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CDkQ6AEwAg
1910s

Change

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

Woodrow Wilson

1910s, Address to Congress on War (1917)

World , Peace , Democracy

“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.”

Woodrow Wilson

Speech in New York (23 May 1912)
1910s

Love , Life , God , Business

“Power consists in one's capacity to link his will with the purpose of others, to lead by reason and a gift of cooperation.”

Woodrow Wilson

From a letter to Mary A. Hulbert (21 September 1913)
1910s

“All the peoples of the world are in effect partners in this interest, and for our own part we see very clearly that unless justice be done to others it will not be done to us.”

Woodrow Wilson

1910s, The Fourteen Points Speech (1918)

People , World , Justice , Parting

“A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated.”

Woodrow Wilson

Section VIII: “Monopoly, Or Opportunity?”, p. 185 http://books.google.com/books?id=MW8SAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA185&dq=%22A+great+industrial+nation%22. Note that this remark has been used as the basis for a fake quotation discussed below.
1910s, The New Freedom (1913)
Context: A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men who, even if their action be honest and intended for the public interest, are necessarily concentrated upon the great undertakings in which their own money is involved and who necessarily, by very reason of their own limitations, chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom. This is the greatest question of all, and to this statesmen must address themselves with an earnest determination to serve the long future and the true liberties of men.

“There is such thing as a man being too proud to fight.”

Woodrow Wilson

Address to Foreign-Born Citizens (10 May 1915)
1910s

Fight

“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.”

Woodrow Wilson

Campaign speech in Chicago (6 April 1912)
1910s

Heart

“Our whole strength will be put into this war of emancipation, -- emancipation from the threat and attempted mastery of selfish groups of autocratic rulers, -- whatever the difficulties and present partial delays. We are indomitable in our power of independent action and can in no circumstances consent to live in a world governed by intrigue and force. We believe that our own desire for a new international order under which reason and justice and the common interests of mankind shall prevail is the desire of enlightened men everywhere. Without that new order the world will be without peace and human life will lack tolerable conditions of existence and development. Having set our hand to the task of achieving it, we shall not turn back.”

Woodrow Wilson

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

Life , Men , War , World

“The way to stop financial joy-riding is to arrest the chauffeur, not the automobile.”

Woodrow Wilson

The Atlanta Constitution (14 January 1914), p. 1 http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/ajc_historic/access/549848262.html?dids=549848262:549848262&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:AI&date=Jan+14,+1914&author=&pub=The+Atlanta+Constitution&desc=STOP+THE+%22JOY+RIDING%22+BY+ARRESTING+CHAUFFEUR+AND+NOT+THE+AUTOMOBILE&pqatl=google
1910s

Way , Joy

“If you think too much about being re-elected, it is very difficult to be worth re-electing.”

Woodrow Wilson

Rededication and restoration of Congress Hall http://books.google.com/books?id=w0IOAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA30&dq=%22If+you+think+too+much%22, Philadelphia (25 October 1913)
1910s

Thinking

“There can be no equality or opportunity, the first essential of justice in the body politic, if men and women and children be not shielded in their lives, their very vitality, from the consequences of great industrial and social processes which they can not alter, control, or singly cope with.”

Woodrow Wilson

First Inaugural Address http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=25831 (4 March 1913)
1910s

Women , Men , Children , Justice

“Like a lusty child, government with us has expanded in nature and grown great in stature, but has also become awkward in movement… English and American political history has been a history, not of administrative development, but of legislative oversight-not of progress in governmental organization, but of advance in law-making and political criticism… We go on criticising when we ought to be creating.”

Woodrow Wilson

Source: 1880s, "The Study of Administration," 1887, p. 203; as cited in: Dimock (1937;28)

Law , History , Nature