Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924)

Quotes

• One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty councils. The thing is to supply light and not heat.

• There is no higher religion than human service. To work for the common good is the greatest creed.

• 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 great 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 sincerely hope that their dreams will come true.

• A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying to do. We are trying to do a futile thing if we do not know where we came from or what we have been about.

• When you have read the Bible, you will know it is the word of God, because you will have found it the key to your own heart, your own happiness, and your own duty.

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

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

• I used to be a lawyer, but now I am a reformed character.

• 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....

• The world must be made safe for democracy.

• I'd rather lose a cause that will one day win than win a cause that will some day lose.

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

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

• 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.

• Here is a great body of our Jewish citizens from whom have sprung men of genius in every walk of our varied life; men who have conceived of its ideals with singular clearness; and led enterprises with sprit & sagacity... They are not Jews in America, they are American citizens.

• Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance.

• The history of liberty is a history of limitation of government power, not the increase of it.

• Our industries have expanded to such a point that they will burst their jackets if they cannot find a free outlet to the markets of the world. Our domestic markets no longer suffice. We need foreign markets.