Woodrow Wilson Men Quotations

The Government of the United States would be constrained to hold the Imperial German government to a strict accountability for such acts of their naval authorities.

Politics is a war of causes; a joust of principles. Government is too serious a matter to admit of meaningless courtesies.

No thoughtful man ever came to the end of his life, and had time and a little space of calm from which to look back upon it, who did not know and acknowledge that it was what he had done unselfishly and for others, and nothing else, that satisfied him in the retrospect, and made him feel that he had played the man.

Never murder a man when he's busy committing suicide.

Government, in it's last analysis, is organized force.

There is something better, if possible, that a man can give than his life. That is his living spirit to a service that is not easy, to resist counsels that are hard to resist, to stand against purposes that are difficult to stand against.

Democracy is not so much a form of government as a set of principles.

To be free is not necessarily to be wise. Wisdom comes with counsel, with the frank and free conference of untrammeled men united in the common interest.

When they the American soldiers came, they found fit comrades for their courage and their devotion.... Joining hands with them, the men of America gave the greatest of all gifts - the gift of life and the gift of spirit.

America is the place where you cannot kill your government by killing the men who conduct it.

Princeton is no longer a thing for Princeton men to please themselves with. Princeton is a thing with which Princeton men must satisfy the country.

I do not want to live under a philanthropy. I do not want to be taken care of by the government.... We do not want a benevolent government. We want a free and a just government.

Once lead this people into war, and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight, you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fiber of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street.

We [Americans] have a great ardor for gain; but we have a deep passion for the rights of man.

No government has ever been beneficent when the attitude of government was that it was taking care of the people. The only freedom consists in the people taking care of the government.

The firm basis of government is justice, not pity.

The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation—until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.

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.

The masters of the government of the United States are the combined capitalists and manufacturers of the United States.

The presidential office is not a rosewater affair. This is an office in which a man must put on his war paint.

A presidential campaign may easily degenerate into a mere personal contest, and so lose its real dignity. There is no indispensable man.

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 swelling or growing. The mischief of it is that when they swell, they do not swell enough to burst.

There is such a thing as 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 that it is right.

I have sometimes heard men say politics must have nothing to do with business, and I have often wished that business had nothing to do with politics.

If I cannot retain my moral influence over a man except by occasionally knocking him down, if that is the only basis upon which he will respect me, then for the sake of his soul I have got occasionally to knock him down.

No peace can last, or ought to last, which does not recognize and accept the principle that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that no right anywhere exists to hand peoples from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were property.

Government is not a warfare of interests.

It is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shouting at you.

There was a time when corporations played a minor part in our business affairs, but now they play the chief part, and most men are the servants of corporations.

War is only a sort of dramatic representation, a sort of dramatic symbol of a thousand forms of duty. I fancy that it is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shooting at you.

The great monopoly in this country is the money monopoly. So long as it exists, our old variety of freedom and individual energy of development are out of the question.

We grow through our dreams. All great men and women are dreamers. Some, however, allow their dreams to die. You should nurse your dreams and protect them through bad times and tough times to the sunshine and light which always come.

It is not men that interest or disturb me primarily; it is ideas. Ideas live; men die.

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

There is no indispensable man.

Surely a man has come to himself only when he has found the best that is in him, and has satisfied his heart with the highest achievement he is fit for.

...to make the world safe for democracy.

A man has deprived himself of the best there is in the world who has (been) deprived of (the Bible).

It does not become America that within her borders, where every man is free to follow the dictates of his conscience, men should raise the cry of church against church. To do that is to strike at the very spirit and heart of America.

The allied nations with the fullest concurrence of our government and people are agreed that in Palestine shall be laid the foundations of a Jewish Commonwealth.

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

I fancy that it is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shooting at you

Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too much of government, and at the same time do for it too little. . . . We must strive for normalcy to reach stability.

I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country,

Your enlightenment depends on the company you keep. You do not know the world until you know the men who have possessed it and tried its wares before you were ever given your brief run upon it.

We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the world.

America is not a mere body of traders; it is a body of free men. Our greatness is built upon our freedom - is moral, not material. We have a great ardor for gain; but we have a deep passion for the rights of man.

Liberty does not consist in mere declarations of the rights of man. It consists in the translation of those declarations into definite action.

A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American. And the man who goes among you to trade upon your nationality is no worthy son to live under the Stars and Stripes.

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. Limits of wisdom and convenience to the public control there may be: limits of principle there are, upon strict analysis, none.

Government is merely an attempt to express the conscience of everybody, the average conscience of the nation, in the rules that everybody is commanded to obey. That is all it is.

There has been something crude and heartless and unfeeling in our haste to suceed and be great. Our thought has been 'Let every man look out for himself, let every generation look out for itself,' while we reared giant machinery which made it impossible that any but those who stood at the levers of control should have a chance to look out for themselves.

...it would be a mistake...to ascribe to Roman legal conceptions an undivided sway over the development of law and institutions during the Middle Ages... The Laws of Moses as well as the laws of Rome contributed suggestions and impulse to the men and institutions which were to prepare the modern world; and if we could have but eyes to see... we should readily discover how very much besides religion we owe to the Jew.

A man's rootage is more important than his leafage.

The trouble with the theory [of limited and divided government] is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. This is where the living and breathing constitution comes from. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life.

Freedom exists only where the people take care of the government.

Statesmen have to bend to the collective will of their peoples or be broken.

One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty councils. The thing to do is to supply light and not heat. Ay any rate, if it is heat it ought to be white heat and not sputter, because sputtering heat is apt to spread the fire. There ought, if there is any heat at all, to be that warmth of the heart which makes every man thrust aside his own personal feeling, his own personal interest, and take thought of the welfare and benefit of others.

If you will think about what you ought to do for other people, your character will take care of itself. Character is a by-product, and any man who devotes himself to its cultivation in his own case will become a selfish prig.

All the extraordinary men I have known were extraordinary in their own estimation.

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

I believe in human liberty as I believe in the wine of life. There is no salvation for men in the pitiful condescension of industrial masters. Guardians have no place in a land of freemen.

The natural man inevitably rebels against mathematics, a mild form of torture that could only be learned by painful processes of drill.

I am a most unhappy man. I accidentally ruined my country. A great industrial nation is now controlled by its system of credit. Our government is no longer based on the freedom of opinion, nor on the conviction and the majority decision, it is now a government which is subjected to the conviction and the compulsion of a small group of dominant men.

You have just taken an oath of allegiance to the United States. Of allegiance to whom? Of allegiance to no one, unless it be God. Certainly not of allegiance to those who temporarily represent this great government. You have taken an oath of allegiance to a great ideal, to a great body of principles, to a great hope of the human race.

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

The question of armaments, whether on land or sea, is the most immediately and intensely practical question connected with the future fortunes of nations and of mankind.

Man is much more than a 'rational being' and lives more by sympathies and impressions than by conclusions. It darkens his eyes and dries up the wells of his humanity to be forever in search of doctrine. We need wholesome, experiencing na­tures, I dare affirm, much more than we need sound reasoning.

The awakening of the people of China to the possibilities under free government is the most significant, if not the most momentous, event of our generation.

Never attempt to murder a man who is committing suicide.

A man is not as big as his belief in himself; he is as big as the number of persons who believe in him.

Scholarship cannot do without literature.... It needs literature to float it, to set it current, to authenticate it to all the race, to get it out of closets and into the brains of men who stir abroad.

I have received delegations of working men who come, apparently speaking of the utmost sincerity, have declared that they would regard it as a genuine hardship to be deprived of their beer.

The welfare, the happiness, the energy and spirit of the men and women who do the daily workis the underlying necessity of all prosperity.... There can be nothing wholesome unless their life is wholesome; there can be no contentment unless they are contented.

No man can be just who is not free.

The nature of men and of organized society dictates the maintenance in every field of action of the highest and purest standards of justice and of right dealing.... By justice the lawyer generally means the prompt, fair, and open application of impartial rules; but we call ours a Christian civilization, and a Christian conception of justice must be much higher. It must include sympathy and helpfulness and a willingness to forego self-interest in order to promote the welfare, happiness, and contentment of others and of the community as a whole.

Whatever may be said against the chewing of tobacco, this at least can be said of it, that it gives a man time to think between sentences.

The men who act stand nearer to the mass of man than the men who write; and it is in their hands that new thought gets its translation into the crude language of deeds.

No man ever saw a government. I live in the midst of the Government of the United States, but I never saw the Government of the United States.

When you come into the presence of a leader of men, you know that you have come into the presence of fire - that it is best not uncautiously to touch that man - that there is something that makes it dangerous to cross him.

In the last analysis, my fellow country men, as we in America would be the first to claim, a people are responsible for the acts of their government.

Conformity will be the only virtue and any man who refuses to conform will have to pay the penalty.

The man who disparages music as a luxury and non-essential is doing the nation an injury. Music now, more than ever before, is a national need.

Have you thought of the sufferings of Armenia? You poured out your money to help succor the Armenians after they suffered; now set your strength so that they shall never suffer again.

Too much law was too much government; and too much government was too little individual privilege,- as too much individual privilege in its turn was selfish license

It is the object of learning, not only to satisfy the curiosity and perfect the spirits of ordinary men, but also to advance civilization.

Great statesmen seem to direct and rule by a sort of power to put themselves in the place of the nation over which they are set, and may thus be said to possess the souls of poets at the same time they display the coarser sense and the more vulgar sagacity of practical men of business.

Such a mind we must desire to see in a woman,--a mind that stirs without irritating you, that arouses but does not belabour, amuses and yet subtly instructs.

We are expected to put the utmost energy, of every power that we have, into the service of our fellow men, never sparing ourselves, not condescending to think of what is going to happen to ourselves, but ready, if need be, to go to the utter length of self-sacrifice.

I confess my belief in the common man.... The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.... The man who is in the melee knows what blows are being struck and what blood is being drawn.

God knows that any man who would seek the presidency of the United States is a fool for his pains. The burden is all but intolerable, and the things that I have to do are just as much as the human spirit can carry.

Any man that resists the present tides that run in the world, will find himself thrown upon a shore so high and barren that it will seem he has been separated from his human kind forever.

No nation is fit to sit in judgment upon any other nation

If you would be a leader of men you must lead your own generation, not the next. Your playing must be good now, while the play ison the boards and the audience in the seats.... It will not get you the repute of a good actor to have excellencies discovered in you afterwards.

Leadership does not always wear the harness of compromise. Once and again one of those great influences which we call a Cause arises in the midst of a nation. Men of strenuous minds and high ideals come forward.... The attacks they sustain are more cruel than the collision of arms.... Friends desert and despise them.... They stand alone and oftentimes are made bitter by their isolation.... They are doing nothing less than defy public opinion, and shall they convert it by blows. Yes.

That is Gladstone, the greatest statesman that ever lived. I intend to be a statesman, too.

The competent leader of men cares little for the niceties of other peoples' characters: he cares much--everything--for the exterior uses to which they may be put.... These are men to be moved. How should he move them? He supplies the power; others simply the materials on which that power operates.

We ought to regard ourselves and to act as socialists--believers in the wholesomeness and beneficence of the body politic.

I must beg you to indulge me in the matter of hyphens.... You will find that I have marked out a great many in the proofs. We arein danger of Germanizing our printing by using them so much, and I have a very decided preference in the matter.

The rule for every man is, not to depend on the education which other men have prepared for him-not even to consent to it; but to strive to see things as they are, and to be himself as he is. Defeat lies in self-surrender.