Quotes by Woodrow Wilson
"Some people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world."

"We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers."

"If you want to make enemies, try to change something."

...it is as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shooting at you.


A conservative is a man who sits and thinks, mostly sits.

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.

I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow.

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.

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

The flag is the embodiment, not of sentiment, but of history.

The law that will work is merely the summing up in legislative form of the moral judgement that the community has already reached.

The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.

You are not here merely to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world. You impoverish yourself if you forget this errand.

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.

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.

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.
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The world must be made safe for democracy.

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.

Once lead this people into war and they will forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.

I can imagine no greater disservice to the county than to establish a system of censorship that would deny to the people of a free republic like our own their indisputable right to criticize their own public officials. While exercising the great powers of 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.

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

No nation is fit to sit in judgement upon any other nation.

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 that it is right.

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

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

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

This page was last updated: June 29, 2013
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