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Woodrow Wilson Quotes
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Thomas Woodrow Wilson was an American statesman and academic who served as the 28th President of the United States from 1913 to 1921. A member of the Democratic Party, Wilson served as the President of Princeton University from 1902 to 1910 and then ran and was elected as a progressive Democrat to the office of Governor of New Jersey. Wilson's victory in the 1912 presidential election made him the first Southerner elected to the presidency since Zachary Taylor in 1848. He also led the United States during World War I, establishing an activist foreign policy known as "Wilsonianism." He was a major leader at the Paris [Versailles] Peace Conference in 1919, where he championed the proposed League of Nations. However, he was unable to obtain Senate approval for U.S. membership. After he suffered debilitating strokes in September 1919, his wife and staff members handled most of his presidential duties.

Born in Staunton, Virginia, he spent his early years in Augusta, Georgia and Columbia, South Carolina. His father was a leading Presbyterian in the Confederacy during the Civil War, and Wilson was always a devout Presbyterian and a proud Southerner. He took a law degree and then one of the first PhDs in political science awarded by Johns Hopkins University. He served as a professor and scholar at various institutions before being selected as President of Princeton University, a position he held from 1902 to 1910. Wilson became a notable academic, arguing for the superiority of the parliamentary system. He was associated with Grover Cleveland and the conservative Bourbon Democrats until 1910, when he moved left. With the help of state Democratic bosses, Wilson won the 1910 Democratic nomination for governor of New Jersey, and was elected as a fresh reformer, holding office from 1911 to 1913. He overthrew the same bosses and gained a national reputation. He won the 1912 Democratic presidential nomination after forty-six rounds of balloting, with support from William Jennings Bryan. Former President Theodore Roosevelt's third party candidacy split the Republican Party, which re-nominated incumbent President William Howard Taft. Wilson won the 1912 election with a plurality of the popular vote and a large majority in the electoral college.

Leading the Congress that was now in Democratic hands, he oversaw the passage of progressive legislative policies unparalleled until the New Deal in 1933. The Federal Reserve Act, Federal Trade Commission Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, and the Federal Farm Loan Act were some of these new policies. Having taken office one month after ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment, Wilson called a special session of Congress, whose work culminated in the Revenue Act of 1913, introducing an income tax and lowering tariffs. Through passage of the Adamson Act that imposed an 8-hour workday for railroads, he averted a railroad strike and an ensuing economic crisis. Upon the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Wilson maintained a policy of neutrality, while pursuing a more aggressive policy in dealing with Mexico's civil war. Wilson staffed his government with Southern Democrats who implemented racial segregation at the Treasury, Navy and other Federal offices. In the presidential election of 1916, Wilson faced former New York Governor Charles Evans Hughes. By a narrow margin, he became the first Democrat since Andrew Jackson elected to two consecutive terms.

In April 1917, when Germany had resumed unrestricted submarine warfare and sent the Zimmermann Telegram, Wilson asked Congress to declare war in order to make "the world safe for democracy." The United States conducted military operations alongside the Allies, although without a formal alliance. During the war, Wilson focused on diplomacy and financial considerations, leaving military strategy to the generals, especially General John J. Pershing. Through the Selective Service Act, conscription sent 10,000 freshly trained soldiers to France per day by the summer of 1918. On the home front, he raised income taxes, borrowing billions of dollars through the public's purchase of Liberty Bonds. He set up the War Industries Board, promoted labor union cooperation, regulated agriculture and food production through the Lever Act, and took direct control of the nation's railroad system. Wilson asked Congress for what became the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, suppressing anti-draft activists. The crackdown was intensified by his Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer to include expulsion of non-citizen radicals during the First Red Scare of 1919–1920. Early in 1918, Wilson issued his principles for an end to the war, the Fourteen Points, and in 1919, following an armistice, he traveled to Paris, promoting the formation of a League of Nations and concluding the Treaty of Versailles. Following his return from Europe, Wilson embarked on a nationwide tour in 1919 to campaign for the treaty, but suffered a severe stroke. The treaty was met with serious concern by Senate Republicans, and the Senate ultimately rejected the treaty. Due to his stroke, Wilson secluded himself in the White House, disability having diminished his power and influence, and he failed in his bid to win re-nomination at the 1920 Democratic National Convention. Wilson retired at the end of his presidency, and he died in 1924.

✵ 28. December 1856 – 3. February 1924   •   Other names Томас Вудро Вильсон
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Woodrow Wilson: 156   quotes 32   likes

Woodrow Wilson Quotes

“Government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton.”

Woodrow Wilson

Section II: “What Is Progress?”, p. 47
1910s, The New Freedom (1913)

Life , Universe

“You know that it was Jefferson who said that the best government is that which does as little governing as possible…. But that time is passed. America is not now and cannot in the future be a place for unrestricted individual enterprise.”

Woodrow Wilson

“Campaign Address in Scranton, Penn.,” (September 23, 1912) http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/campaign-address-in-scranton-penn/
1910s

Time , Future

“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.”

Woodrow Wilson

“Socialism and Democracy,” essay published in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Arthur S. Link, ed., Vol. 5, Princeton University Press, 1968, pp. 559-62, (first published, August 22, 1887)
1880s

Men , Democracy , Communication

“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

Section II: “What is Progress?”, p. 35 http://books.google.com/books?id=MW8SAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA35&dq=%22The+government,+which+was+designed%22
1910s, The New Freedom (1913)

People , Democracy

“No man can sit down and withhold his hands from the warfare against wrong and get peace from his acquiescence.”

Woodrow Wilson

“A Book Which Reveals Men to Themselves”, Address on the Tercentenary of the Tranlation of the Bible (7 May 1911) in The Politics of Woodrow Wilson, p. 104 http://books.google.com/books?id=rxC4IG60KTwC&pg=PA104&dq=%22withhold+his+hands+from+the+warfare+against+wrong%22
1910s

Peace

“I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men.”

Woodrow Wilson

Statement to British envoy William Tyrrell explaining his policy on Mexico (November 1913)
1910s

Men

“2. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war.”

Woodrow Wilson

1910s, The Fourteen Points Speech (1918)

War , Peace , Freedom , Water

“Segregation is not humiliating, but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.”

Woodrow Wilson

As quoted in “Expunging Woodrow Wilson from Official Places of Honor,” Randy Barnett, The Washington Post, June 25, 2015, Wilson’s reply to William Monroe Trotter. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/06/25/expunging-woodrow-wilson-from-official-places-of-honor/?utm_term=.ce836b256091
1920s and later
Context: It will take one hundred years to eradicate this prejudice, and we must deal with it as practical men. Segregation is not humiliating, but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.

“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.”

Woodrow Wilson

Speech in New York City http://books.google.com/books?id=Bc7iAAAAMAAJ&q="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", (19 Nov 1905), The Papers of Woodrow Wilson 16:228
1900s

Life , Men , Past , Personality

“I have read it with the deepest appreciation of Mr. Herron's singular insight into all the elements of a complicated situation and into my own motives and purposes.”

Woodrow Wilson

Letter to Mitchell Kennerley about the book Woodrow Wilson and the World's Peace, October 1, 1917 https://books.google.com/books?id=Gr6atcdK37EC&pg=PA123 https://books.google.com/books?id=2BL2AwAAQBAJ&pg=PA2383
1910s

Motivation , Reading

“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.”

Woodrow Wilson

Address on Latin American Policy before the Southern Commercial Congress http://books.google.com/books?id=_VYEIml1cAkC&q=%22I+would+rather+belong+to+a+poor+nation+that+was+free+than+to+a+rich+nation+that+had+ceased+to+be+in+love+with+liberty%22&pg=PA20#v=onepage Mobile, Alabama (27 October 1913)
1910s

Love

“This war, in its inception was a commercial and industrial war. It was not a political war.”

Woodrow Wilson

Speech at the Coliseum in St. Louis, Missouri, on the Peace Treaty and the League of Nations (5 September 1919), as published in "The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Authorized Edition) War and Peace: Presidential Messages, Addresses, and Public Papers (1917-1924) by Woodrow Wilson Volume I Page 638. Addresses Delivered by President Wilson on his Western Tour - September 4 To September 25, 1919. From 66th Congress, 1st Session, Senate Document No. 120
1910s

War

“Some men who are not real men love other things about themselves, but the real man believes that his honor is dearer than his life; and a nation is merely all of us put together, and the nation's honor is dearer than the nation's comfort and the nation's peace and the nation's life itself.”

Woodrow Wilson

Speech in Cleveland http://books.google.com/books?id=o3j10P6YFZIC&pg=PA1090&dq=%22nation's+honor+is+dearer+than+the+nation's+comfort%22 (January 1916)
1910s

Love , Life , Men , Peace

“Of 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

Letter to Winterton C. Curtis (29 August 1922)
1920s and later

Education , Intelligence , Question

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

Woodrow Wilson

Speech at New York Press Club (9 September 1912), in The papers of Woodrow Wilson, 25:124
1910s

History

“Negro rule under unscrupulous adventurers had been finally put an end to in the South, and the natural, inevitable ascendancy of the whites, the responsible class, established.”

Woodrow Wilson

Division and Reunion, 1829-1889 Longmans, Green, & Company (1893) p. 273
1890s

Nature

“The object of education is not merely to draw out the powers of the individual mind: it is rather its right object to draw all minds to a proper adjustment to the physical and social world in which they are to have their life and their development: to enlighten, strengthen and make fit.”

Woodrow Wilson

"Princeton In The Nation's Service" (21 October 1896)
1890s

Life , World , Education , Drawing

“The success of a party means little except when the Nation is using that party for a large and definite purpose.”

Woodrow Wilson

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

Success

“No man that does not see visions will ever realize any high hope or undertake any high enterprise.”

Woodrow Wilson

“ Citizens of Foreign Birth http://books.google.com/books?id=_VYEIml1cAkC&pg=PA87&dq=%22No+man+that+does+not+see+visions%22”, Philadelphia (10 May 1915)
1910s

Hope

“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.”

Woodrow Wilson

As quoted in American Chronicle (1945) by Ray Stannard Baker, quoted on unnumbered page opposite p. 1
1920s and later

Life , Men , God , Error

“[W]e are not bound to adhere to the doctrine held by the signers of the Declaration of Independence.”

Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson, “The Author and Signers of the Declaration,” (July 1907), The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (PWW), 17:251
1900s

“It is getting to be harder to run a constitution than to frame one.”

Woodrow Wilson

1880s, "The Study of Administration," 1887

“At every crisis in one's life, it is absolute salvation to have some sympathetic friend to whom you can think aloud without restraint or misgiving.”

Woodrow Wilson

Letter to Mary Allen Hulbert Peck (1 August 1909), PWW 19:321
1900s

Life , Thinking

“There are blessed intervals when I forget by one means or another that I am President of the United States.”

Woodrow Wilson

Speech to the National Press Club http://books.google.com/books?id=8gLmAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA439 (20 March 1914)
1910s

Forgetting

“There is a price which is too great to pay for peace, and that price can be put in one word. One cannot pay the price of self-respect.”

Woodrow Wilson

Des Moines Iowa speech (1 February 1916) http://www.combat.ws/S3/BAKISSUE/CMBT01N2/SMOKE.HTM, on "The Westerm Preparedness Tour" http://www.allthingswilliam.com/presidents/wilson.html
1910s

Peace

“RADICAL—one who goes too far.
CONSERVATIVE—one who does not go far enough.
REACTIONARY—one who does not go at all.”

Woodrow Wilson

Speech to Kansas Society of New York (23 January 1911) — Wilson's definition of different groups, PWW 22:389
1910s

“It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”

Woodrow Wilson

Remarks on The Birth of a Nation attributed to Wilson by writer Thomas Dixon, after White House screening of the film, which was based on Dixon's The Clansman. Wilson later said that he disapproved of the "unfortunate film." Wilson aide Joseph Tumulty, in a letter to the Boston branch of the NAACP in response to reports of Wilson's regard for the film wrote: The President was entirely unaware of the nature of the play before it was presented and at no time has expressed his approbation of it.
Misattributed

History

“5. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims.”

Woodrow Wilson

1910s, The Fourteen Points Speech (1918)

“The ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people.”

Woodrow Wilson

“The Leaders of Men”, speech at the University of Tennessee (17 June 1890), in The Politics of Woodrow Wilson, p. 74 http://books.google.com/books?id=rxC4IG60KTwC&pg=PA74&dq=%22ear+of+the+leader+must+ring+with+the+voices+of+the+people%22
1890s

People

“I am inclined to follow the course suggested by a friend of mine who says that he has always followed the rule never to murder a man who is committing suicide, and clearly this misdirected gentleman is committing suicide slowly but sureley.”

Woodrow Wilson

Letter to Bernard Baruch (19 August 1916), PWW 38:51
1910s
Variant: Never attempt to murder a man who is committing suicide.

Suicide

“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

War , Thinking , Country

“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

Life , Truth , Country

“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

War , World

“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

People

“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

Love , Failure

“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

Memory

“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

Science , Heart

“[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

Fear , Tea

“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

Men , Home , Learning , Universe

“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

Men , World , Dreams , Business

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

Woodrow Wilson

On Being Human http://books.google.com/books?id=hp0RAAAAMAAJ&q="Gossips+are+only+sociologists+upon+a+mean+and+petty+scale"&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

People , Exercises , Imagination , Intelligence

“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)

Men , Way , Business , Time

“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)

World , Peace , Justice , Universe

“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