Quotes By Woodrow Wilson

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

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.

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.

The only use of an obstacle is to be overcome. All that an obstacle does with brave men is, not to frighten them, but to challenge them.

Interest does not tie nations together; it sometimes separates them. But sympathy and understanding does unite them.

Tell me what is right and I will fight for it.

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.

The seed of revolution is repression.

I would rather lose in a cause that will some day win, than win in a cause that will some day lose.

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.

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.

If a dog will not come to you after having looked you in the face, you should go home and examine your conscience.

Absolute identity with one's cause is the first and great condition of successful leadership.

America is not anything if it consists of each of us. It is something only if it consists of all of us.

Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world.

There is little for the great part of the history of the world except the bitter tears of pity and the hot tears of wrath.

You cannot, in human experience, rush into the light. You have to go through the twilight into the broadening day before the noon comes and the full sun is upon the landscape.

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

Never attempt to murder a man who is committing suicide.

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.

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.

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

There are blessed intervals when I forget by one means or another that I am President of the United States.

Prosperity is necessarily the first theme of a political campaign.

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

As compared with the college politician, the real article seems like an amateur.

Generally young men are regarded as radicals. This is a popular misconception. The most conservative persons I ever met are college undergraduates. The radicals are the men past middle life.

Golf is a game in which one endeavors to control a ball with implements ill adapted for the purpose.

When I give a man an office, I watch him carefully to see whether he is swelling or growing.

My dream of politics all my life has been that it is the common business, that it is something we owe to each other to understand and discuss with absolute frankness.