"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, 1919
There never was a good war, or a bad peace
Benjamin Franklin
I slept, and dreamed that life was Beauty; I woke,
and found that life was Duty
Ellen Sturgis Hooper
America and Americans
"We have restricted credit, we have restricted opportunity, we have controlled
development, and 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 the duress of
small groups of dominant men."
Woodrow Wilson
Source: in his book, The New Freedom: A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous
Energies of a People, chapter 9
"The great melting-pot of America, the place where we are all made Americans of,
is the public school, where men of every race, and of every origin, and of every
station of life send their children, or ought to send their children, and where,
being mixed together, they are all infused with the American spirit and developed
into the American man and the American woman."
"A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in
America has not yet become an American."
We want the spirit of America to be efficient; we want American character to be
efficient; we want American character to display itself in what I may, perhaps,
be allowed to call spiritual efficiency--clear, disinterested thinking and
fearless action along the right lines of thought. America is not anything if it
consists of each of us. It is something only if it consists of all of us; and
it can consist of all of us only as our spirits are banded together in a common
enterprise, That common enterprise is the enterprise of liberty and justice and
right. And, therefore, I, for my part, have a great enthusiasm for rendering
American spiritually efficient; and that conception lies at the basis of what
seems very far removed from it, namely, the plans that have been proposed
for the military efficiency of this nation.
Some Americans need hyphens in their names, because only part of them has come
over; but when the whole man has come over, heart and thought and all, the hyphen
drops of its own weight out of his name.
Just what is it that America stands for? If she stands for one thing more than
another, it is for the sovereignty of self-governing people, and her example, her
assistance, her encouragement, has thrilled two continents in this western world
with all those fine impulses which have built up human liberty on both sides of
the water. She stands, therefore, as an example of independence, as an example of
free institutions, and as an example of disinterested international action in the
main tenets of justice.
America is not a mere body of traders; it is a body of free men. Our greatness--
build upon freedom--is moral, not material. We have great ardor for gain; but we
have a deep passion for the rights of men.
Woodrow Wilson 12/6/1911
American Army
"One of our American wits said that it took only half as
long to train an American army as any other because you
only had to train them to go one way."
American Revolution
"The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation. "
Blessed
"There are blessed intervals when I forget by one means
or another that I am President of the United States. "
Brains
"I not only use all the brains that I have,
but all that I can borrow. "
Business
"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."
Change
"If you want to make enemies, try to change something. "
Character
Nothing is worthwhile that is not hard.
You do not improve your muscle by doing
the easy thing; you improve it by doing
the hard thing, and you get your zest by
doing a thing that is difficult, not a
thing that is easy.
Woodrow Wilson 6/5/1914
Civilization
"The sum of the whole matter is this, that our civilization
cannot survive materially unless it be redeemed spiritually."
The Road Away from Revolution," Atlantic Monthly, August, 1923.
Clients
My clients are the children; my clients are
the next generation.
Wilson, pleading the cause of the United Nations
Competition
While competition cannot be created by statutory enactment, it can in
large measure be revived by changing the laws and forbiding the
practices that killed it.
Woodrow Wilson
Speech, Aug 7, 1912
Congress
"Congress in session is Congress on public exhibition,
whilst Congress in its committee rooms is Congress at work.
Congressional Government, A Study in American Politics (1885).
Conservative
"A conservative is a man who just sits and thinks, mostly sits."
"A conservative is someone who makes no changes and consults his
grandmother when in doubt."
"By 'radical,' I understand one who goes too far; by 'conservative,'
one who does not go far enough; by 'reactionary,' one who won't
go at all."
Creed
"There is no higher religion than human service. To work for
the common good is the greatest creed.
Declaration of War
"It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people
into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all
wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance.
But the right is more precious than peace, and we
shall fight for the things which we have always carried
nearest our hearts, for democracy, for the right of
those who submit to authority to have a voice in
their own governments, for the rights and liberties
of small nations, for a universal dominion of right
by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring
peace and safety to all nations and make the world
itself at last free. To such a task we dedicate our
lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and
everything that we have, with the pride of those
who know that the day has come when America
is privileged to spend her blood and her might for
the principles that gave her birth and happiness and
the peace which she has treasured. God helping her,
she can do no other.
Address to Joint Session of Congress,
asking for a declaration of war, April 2, 1917.
Democracy
"I believe in democracy because it releases the energies
of every human being."
The world must be made safe for democracy."
(To Congress when seeking a declaration of war, 1917
Gentlemen, the select classes of mankind are
not longer the governors of mankind. The
fortunes of mankind are now in the hands of
the plain people of the whole world.
Satisfy them, and you have not only justified
their confidence, but established peace.
Fail to satisfy them, and no arrangement that
you can make will either set up or steady the
peace of the world.
Woodrow Wilson to the League of Nations
1/25/1919
Democrat
"I am all kinds of a democrat, so far as I can discover—but
the root of the whole business is this, that I believe in the
patriotism and energy and initiative of the average man."
Dog's Face
"If a dog will not come to you after having looked you in
the face, you should go home and examine your conscience."
Dreams
"We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers.
They see things in the soft haze of a spring day or in the
red fire of a long winter's evening. Some of us let these
dreams die, but others nourish and protect them; nurse
them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine
and light which comes always to those who hope that
their dreams will come true."
Duty
"We live in an age disturbed, confused, bewildered,
afraid of its own forces, in search not merely of its
road but even of its direction. There are many voices
of counsel, but few voices of vision; there is much
excitement and feverish activity, but little concert
of thoughtful purpose. We are distressed by our
own ungoverned, undirected energies and do many
things, but nothing long. It is our duty to find ourselves."
Baccalaureate address as President
of Princeton University, June 9, 1907.
Education
Every man, every man sent out from a university
should be a man of his nation, as well as a
man of his time.
Woodrow Wilson
Equality or Opportunity
"There can be no equality or opportunity if men and women and
children be not shielded in their lives from the consequences of
great industrial and social processes which they cannot
alter, control, or singly cope with."
Fools
"The wisest thing to do with a fool is to encourage him
to hire a hall and discourse to his fellow citizens. Nothing
chills nonsense like exposure to air."
"I have always been among those who believed that the
greatest freedom, speech was the greatest safety,
because if a man is a fool, the best thing to do is to
encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking." (Speech, 1919)
Force
"Government, in its last analysis, is organized force."
-- Woodrow Wilson
(1856-1924) 28th US President
http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Woodrow.Wilson.Quote.2852
Freedom
Freedom exists only where the people take care of the
government.
Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their
honor steady to a common end, and prefer the interests
of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.
The highest and best form of efficiency is the spontaneous
cooperation of a free people.
Woodrow Wilson
Friendship
"Friendship is the only cement that will ever hold the world together."
"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.
Global Affairs
Our interests are those of the open door--
a door of friendship and mutual advantage.
This is the only door we care to enter.
Woodrow Wilson 3/19/1913
There must be, not a balance of power, but a
community of power; not organized rivalries,
but an organized peace.
Woodrow Wilson 1/22/1917
We are at the beginning of an age, in which
it will be insisted that the same standards
of conduct and of responsibility for wrong
done shall be observed among nations and their
governments that are observed among
individual citizens of the United States.
Woodrow Wilson 4/2/1917
We created this Nation, not to serve ourselfs,
but to serve mankind.
Woodrow Wilson
The world must be made saft for democracy.
Its peace must be planted upon the tested
foundations of political liberty. We have
no selfish ends to serve. We desire no
conquest, no dominion. We seek no
indemnities for ourself, no material
compensation for the sacrifices we shall
freely make. We are but one of the
champions of the rights of mankind.
We shall be satisfied when those rights
have been made as secured as the faith
and the freedom of nations can make them.
Woodrow Wilson 4/2/1917
Golf
"Golf is a game in which one endeavors to control a ball
with implements ill adapted for the purpose."
Gossip
"Gossip: sociologists on a mean and petty scale."
Goverment
"Government should not be made an end in itself;
it is a means only -- a means to be freely adapted
to advance the best interests of the social organism.
The state exists for the sake of society, not society
for the sake of the state.
The State; Elements of Historical and Practical
Politics (1911)
Our object now, as then, is to vindicate the
principles of peace and justice in the life of the
world as against selfish and autocratic power,
and to set up among the really free and self
governed peoples of the world such a concert of
purpose and of action as will henceforth insure
the observance of those principles.
- in a address to Congress on war being
declared with Germany
A little group of willful men, representative
of no opinion but their own, have rendered the
great government of the United States helpless
and contemptible.
Willson, response to a Senate filibuster on a bill
to arm American merchant vessels endangered by
German U-boats.
Idealist
"Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the
way I know I am an American . . . America is the only
idealist nation in the world."
Ideas
"It is not men that interest or disturb me primarily; it is
ideas. Ideas live; men die."
Judgment
"One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty counsels.
The thing to do is to supply light and not heat.
Woodrow Wilson
Justice
Justice has nothing to do with expediency.
Woodrow Wilson
Labor
The great struggling unknown masses of men
who are at the base of everything are the
dynamic force that is lifting the levels
of society. A nation is a great and only
as great as her rank and file.
Woodrow Wilson
Men everywhere are going to see that the
problem of labor is nothing more nor less
than the problem of the elevation of humanity.
Woodrow Wilson 9/25/1919
Last Public Statement
"I am not one of those that have the least anxiety about
the triumph of the principles I have stood for: I have seen
fools resist Providence before, and I have seen their
destruction, as will come upon these again, utter
destruction and contempt. That we shall prevail is as
sure as that God reigns."
(His last public words, November, 1923)
League of Nations
"Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?"
(Regarding the League Of Nations.
Liberty
"Liberty has never come from the government.
Liberty has always come from the subjects of government.
The history of liberty is the history of resistance.
The history of liberty is a history
of the limitation of governmental power,
not the increase of it."
Woodrow Wilson
Speech, 1912
"America was established not to create wealth but to
realize a vision, to realize an ideal - to discover and
maintain liberty among men. "
"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."
"Liberty has never come from Government. Liberty has
always come from the subjects of it... The history of
liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power,
not the increase of it."
Life's Purpose
"You are not here merely to make a living.
You are here in order to enable the world to live
more amply, with greater vision, with a finer
spirit of hope and achievement.
You are here to enrich the world,
and you impoverish yourself if you
forget the errand."
-- Woodrow Wilson
(1856-1924) 28th US President
Literacy Gift
"The literary gift is a very dangerous gift to possess
if you are not telling the truth, and I would a great deal
rather, for my part, have a man stumble in his speech than
to feel he was so exceedingly smooth that he had better
be watched both day and night."
Monopoly
"If monopoly persists, monopoly will always sit at the helm of government.
I do not expect monopoly to restrain itself. If there are men in this country
big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it."
Woodrow Wilson
Murder
"Never murder a man who is committing suicide."
Nation's Honor
"The nation's honor is dearer than the nation's comfort; yes,
than the nation's life itself."
No Such Thing
There is no indespensable man.
Woodrow Wilson
Source:Speech, Aug 7, 1912
Offical Documents
"No one who has read official documents needs to be told
how easy it is to conceal the essential truth under the
apparently candid and all-disclosing phrases of a
voluminous and particularizing report . . ."
Peace
"The program of the world's peace, therefore,
is our program; and that program, the only
possible program, as we see it, is this:
1. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at,
after which there shall be no private international
understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall
proceed always frankly and in the public view.
"Fourteen Points" Address to Joint Session of Congress, January 8, 1918.
Only a peace between equals can last. Only a peace
the very principle of which is equality and a common
participation in a common benefit.
Address to the United States Senate on essential terms
of peace in Europe, January 22, 1917.
Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser,
a victor's terms imposed upon the vanquished.
It would be accepted in humiliation, under
duress, at an intolerable sacifice, and would
leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory,
upon which terms of peace would rest, not
permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only
a peace between equals can last; only a peace
the very principle of which is equality and a
common participation in a common benefit.
Woodrow Wilson, 1/27/1917
A steadfast concert for peace can never be
maintained except by a partnership of
democratic nations. No autocratic government
could be trusted to keep faith within it or
observe its covenants. It must be a league of
honor, a partnership of opinion....Only free
peoples can hold their purpose and their honor
steady to a common end and perfer the interests
of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.
Woodrow Wilson, 4/2/1917
Politics
"Politics I conceive to be nothing more than the science of
the ordered progress of society along the lines of greatest
usefulness and convenience to itself."
Power
"Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views
confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the
United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture,
are afraid of something. They know that there is a power
somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so
interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had
better not speak above their breath when they speak in
condemnation of it. "
Woodrow Wilson
Source: In his book entitled The New Freedom (1913)
"When I resist, therefore, when I as a Democrat resist
the concentration of power, I am resisting the processes
of death, because the concentration of power is what
always precedes the destruction of human initiative,
and, therefore of human energy.
Address, New York City, September 4, 1912.
Prosperity
"Prosperity is necessarily the first theme of a political campaign. "
Reading
"I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk
half an hour with the man who wrote it."
Recluse
"Uncompromising thought is the luxury of the closeted recluse."
Re-Election
"If you think too much about being re-elected, it is very
difficult to be worth re-electing."
Right
But the right is more precious than peace, and we
shall fight for the things which we have always
carried nearest our hearts--for democracy, for the
right of those who submit to authority to have a
voice in their own Governments, for the rights and
liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion
of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall
bring peace and safety to all nations and make the
world itself at last free.
There is such a thing as a man being too
proud to fight. There is such a thing as
a nation being so right that it does not
need to convince others by force.
Woodrow Wilson, 4/2/1917
Seed of Revolution
"The seed of revolution is repression."
Seed of War
"Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child
here that does not know that the seed of war in the
modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?
Slave
"The president is a superior kind of slave, and must content
himself with the reflection that the kind is superior!"
Speaking
"If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation;
if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days;
if an hour, I am ready now. "
""The great curse of public life is that you are not allowed to
say all the things you think."
Special Interests
"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."
Strength
"The man who is swimming against the stream knows
the strength of it. "
Teacher
"I have long enjoyed the friendship and companionship of
Republicans because I am by instinct a teacher, and I would
like to teach them something. "
Trickel Down (Reaganonmics)
The way to stop financial "joy-riding" is to arrest
the chauffeur, not the automobile.
University
"The use of a university is to make young gentlemen as
unlike their fathers as possible."
Voices Of The People
"The ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people. "
Washington
"Every man who takes office in Washington either grows or
swells, and when I give a man an office, I watch him carefully
to see whether he is growing or swelling. "
Why We Are Here
"You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order
to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision,
with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to
enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you
forget the errand. "
Winning and Loseing
"I would rather lose in a cause that will some day win,
than win in a cause that will some day lose.
Mail James Howington
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