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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
Woodrow Wilson photo
Woodrow Wilson: 156   quotes 32   likes

Woodrow Wilson Quotes

“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

“Liberty is its own reward.”

Woodrow Wilson

Speech in New York City (9 September 1912)
1910s

“You cannot be friends upon any other terms than upon the terms of equality.”

Woodrow Wilson

Address on Latin American Policy before the Southern Commercial Congress http://books.google.com/books?id=_VYEIml1cAkC&q=%22You+cannot+be+friends+upon+any+other+terms+than+upon+the+terms+of+equality%22&pg=PA19#v=onepage Mobile, Alabama (27 October 1913)
1910s

“One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty counsels. The thing to do is to supply light and not heat.”

Woodrow Wilson

Speech on Military Preparedness, Pittsburgh (29 January 1916)
1910s

Light

“Administration is the most obvious part of government; it is government in action; it is the executive, the operative, the most visible side of government, and is of course as old as government itself.”

Woodrow Wilson

1880s, "The Study of Administration," 1887

Parting

“The only reason I read a book is because I cannot see and converse with the man who wrote it.”

Woodrow Wilson

Speech in Kansas City (12 May 1905), PWW (The Papers of Woodrow Wilson) 16:99
Unsourced variant: I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it.
1900s

Books , Reading

“We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”

Woodrow Wilson

“The Meaning of a Liberal Education”, Address to the New York City High School Teachers Association (9 January 1909)
1900s

Education , Personality

“So, our honest politicians and our honorable corporation heads owe it to their reputations to bring their activities out into the open.”

Woodrow Wilson

Section VI: “Let There Be Light”, p. 36 (Note: different pagination from other references here) http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=1497285&pageno=36
1910s, The New Freedom (1913)

“Armed neutrality, it now appears, is impracticable.”

Woodrow Wilson

1910s, Address to Congress on War (1917)

Appearance

“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. 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 civilized 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 a small group of dominant men.”

Woodrow Wilson

Attributed in Shadow Kings (2005) by Mark Hill, p. 91; This and similar remarks are presented on the internet and elsewhere as an expression of regret for creating the Federal Reserve. The quotation appears to be fabricated from out-of-context remarks Wilson made on separate occasions:

I have ruined my country.

Attributed by Curtis Dall in FDR: My Exploited Father-in-Law, regarding Wilson's break with Edward M. House: "Wilson … evidenced similar remorse as he approached his end. Finally he said, 'I am a most unhappy man. Unwittingly I have ruined my country.'"

A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit.…

"Monopoly, Or Opportunity?" (1912), criticizing the credit situation before the Federal Reserve was created, in The New Freedom (1913), p. 185

We have come to be one of the worst ruled… Governments….

"Benevolence, Or Justice?" (1912), also in The New Freedom (1913), p. 201

The quotation has been analyzed in Andrew Leonard (2007-12-21), " The Unhappiness of Woodrow Wilson https://www.salon.com/2007/12/21/woodrow_wilson_federal_reserve/" Salon:

I can tell you categorically that this is not a statement of regret for having created the Federal Reserve. Wilson never had any regrets for having done that. It was an accomplishment in which he took great pride.

John M. Cooper, professor of history and author of several books on Wilson, as quoted by Andrew Leonard
Misattributed

World , Country , Men

“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…”

Woodrow Wilson

Defending the re-segregation of federal offices, in Conference with members of the National Association for Equal Rights https://web.archive.org/web/20150315002852/http://friesian.com/presiden.htm#43 (November 1914)
1910s

Color , Thinking , People , Country

“There are two beings who assess character instantly by looking into the eyes,—dogs and children. If a dog not naturally possessed of the devil will not come to you after he has looked you in the face, you ought to go home and examine your conscience; and if a little child, from any other reason than mere timidity, looks you in the face, and then draws back and will not come to your knee, go home and look deeper yet into your conscience.”

Woodrow Wilson

“ Young People and the Church http://books.google.com/books?id=iu4nAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA310&dq=%22There+are+two+beings%22“ (13 October 1904)
1900s
Variant: If a dog will not come to you after he has looked you in the face, you ought to go home and examine your conscience.

Home , Drawing , Dogs , Children

“The English race, consequently, has long and successfully studied the art of curbing executive power to the constant neglect of the art of perfecting executive methods. It has exercised itself much more in controlling than in energizing government, It has been more concerned to render government just and moderate than to make it facile, well-ordered,and effective.”

Woodrow Wilson The Study of Administration

Source: 1880s, "The Study of Administration," 1887, p. 206;

Study , Art , Perfection , Making love

“A general peace erected upon such foundations can be discussed. Until such a peace can be secured we have no choice but to go on.”

Woodrow Wilson

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

Peace

“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.”

Woodrow Wilson

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

Reading

“I have always detested Germany. I have never gone there. But I have read many German books on law. They are so far from our views that they have inspired in me a feeling of aversion.”

Woodrow Wilson

Source: Manfred F. Boemeke: Woodrow Wilson’s Image of Germany. In: Manfred Boemeke u. a. (Hrsg.): The Treaty of Versailles. A Reassessment after 75 Years. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1998, S. 603–614, hier S. 603., https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodrow_Wilson#Haltung_zu_Deutschland

Law , Books , Feeling , Reading