Thomas Woodrow Wilson was an American politician and academic who served as the 28th president of the United States from 1913 to 1921.
A member of the Democratic Party, Wilson served as the president of Princeton University and as the governor of New Jersey before winning the 1912 presidential election.
As president, Wilson changed the nation’s economic policies and led the United States into World War I in 1917. He was the leading architect of the League of Nations, and his progressive stance on foreign policy came to be known as Wilsonianism.
List of quotes
| Tell me what is right and I will fight for 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. |
| The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation. |
| 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 ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people. |
| That a peasant may become king does not render the kingdom democratic. |
| 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. |
| So far as the colleges go, the sideshows are swallowing up the circus. |
| 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. |
| Property as compared with humanity, as compared with the red blood in the American people, must take second place, not first place. |
| The seed of revolution is repression. |
| 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. |
| One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty counsels. The thing to do is to supply light and not heat. |
| Never attempt to murder a man who is committing suicide. |
| Neutrality is a negative word. It does not express what America ought to feel. We are not trying to keep out of trouble; we are trying to preserve the foundations on which peace may be rebuilt. |
| Prosperity is necessarily the first theme of a political campaign. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| My own ideals for the university are those of a genuine democracy and serious scholarship. These two, indeed, seem to go together. |
| 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. |
| When I give a man an office, I watch him carefully to see whether he is swelling or growing. |
| What we seek is the reign of law, based upon the consent of the governed and sustained by the organized opinion of mankind. |
| 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. |
| There is no higher religion than human service. To work for the common good is the greatest creed. |
| The history of liberty is a history of resistance. |
| 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. |
| There are blessed intervals when I forget by one means or another that I am President of the United States. |
| The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. |
| 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. |
| The method of political science is the interpretation of life; its instrument is insight, a nice understanding of subtle, unformulated conditions. |
| The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it. |
| We have not given science too big a place in our education, but we have made a perilous mistake in giving it too great a preponderance in method in every other branch of study. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Democracy is not so much a form of government as a set of principles. |
| Caution is the confidential agent of selfishness. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| America was established not to create wealth but to realize a vision, to realize an ideal – to discover and maintain liberty among men. |
| He is not a true man of the world who knows only the present fashions of it. |
| America is not anything if it consists of each of us. It is something only if it consists of all of us. |
| Absolute identity with one’s cause is the first and great condition of successful leadership. |
| A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible. |
| A conservative is someone who makes no changes and consults his grandmother when in doubt. |
| A conservative is a man who just sits and thinks, mostly sits. |
| The world is not looking for servants, there are plenty of these, but for masters, men who form their purposes and then carry them out, let the consequences be what they may. |
| As compared with the college politician, the real article seems like an amateur. |
| I would rather lose in a cause that will some day win, than win in a cause that will some day lose. |
| 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. |
| It is like writing history with lightning and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true. |
| Interest does not tie nations together; it sometimes separates them. But sympathy and understanding does unite them. |
| 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. |
| If you want to make enemies, try to change something. |
| If you think too much about being re-elected, it is very difficult to be worth re-electing. |
| 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. |
| If a dog will not come to you after having looked you in the face, you should go home and examine your conscience. |
| Golf is a game in which one endeavors to control a ball with implements ill adapted for the purpose. |
| 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. |
| I will not speak with disrespect of the Republican Party. I always speak with respect of the past. |
| I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow. |
| 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. |
| I have come slowly into possession of such powers as I have. I receive the opinions of my day. I do not conceive them. But I receive them into a vivid mind. |
| I am not sure that it is of the first importance that you should be happy. Many an unhappy man has been of deep service to himself and to the world. |
| If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it. |