Top 30 Wendell Willkie Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Education is the mother of leadership.”

— Wendell Willkie

2. “I believe in America because we have great dreams, and because we have the opportunity to make those dreams come true.”

— Wendell Willkie

3. “The test of good manners is to be able to put up pleasantly with bad ones.”

— Wendell Willkie

4. “What a man needs to get ahead is a powerful enemy.”

— Wendell Willkie

5. “There are no distant places any longer: the world is small and the world is one.”

— Wendell Willkie

6. “Be honorable yourself if you wish to associate with honorable people.”

— Wendell Willkie

7. “It is from weakness that people reach for dictators and concentrated government power. Only the strong can be free. And only the productive can be strong.”

— Wendell Willkie

8. “No man has a right in America to treat any other man “tolerantly” for tolerance is the assumption of superiority. Our liberties are equal rights of every citizen.”

— Wendell Willkie

9. “Freedom is an indivisible word. If we want to enjoy it, and fight for it, we must be prepared to extend it to everyone, whether they are rich or poor, whether they agree with us or not, no matter what their race or the color of their skin.”

— Wendell Willkie

10. “Tolerance is the assumption of superiority.”

— Wendell Willkie

11. “A true world outlook is incompatible with a foreign imperialism, no matter how high-minded the governing country.”

— Wendell Willkie

12. “A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years.”

— Wendell Willkie

13. “Freedom of the press is the staff of life, for any vital democracy.”

— Wendell Willkie

14. “The modern airplane creates a new geographical dimension. A navigable ocean of air blankets the whole surface of the globe. There are no distant places any longer: the world is small and the world is one.”

— Wendell Willkie

15. “The constitution does not provide for first and second class citizens.”

— Wendell Willkie

16. “If we want to talk about freedom, we must mean freedom for others as well as ourselves, and we must mean freedom for everyone inside our frontiers as well as outside.”

— Wendell Willkie

17. “And political parties, overanxious for vote catching, become tolerant to intolerant groups.”

— Wendell Willkie

18. “Whenever we take away the liberties of those whom we hate we are opening the way to loss of liberty for those we love.”

— Wendell Willkie

19. “We must honestly face our relationship with Great Britain.”

— Wendell Willkie

20. “In no direction that we turn do we find ease or comfort. If we are honest and if we have the will to win we find only danger, hard work and iron resolution.”

— Wendell Willkie

21. “History shows that our way of life is the stronger way. From it has come more wealth, more industry, more happiness, more human enlightenment than from any other way.”

— Wendell Willkie

22. “But if we had to trade with a Europe dominated by the present German trade policies, we might have to change our methods to some totalitarian form. This is a prospect that any lover of democracy must view with consternation.”

— Wendell Willkie

23. “Today it is becoming increasingly apparent to thoughtful Americans that we cannot fight the forces and ideas of imperialism abroad and maintain any form of imperialism at home. The war has done this to our thinking.”

— Wendell Willkie

24. “To suppress minority thinking and minority expression would tend to freeze society and prevent progress. Now more than ever we must keep in the forefront of our minds the fact that whenever we take away the liberties of those we hate, we are opening the way to loss of liberty for those we love.”

— Wendell Willkie

25. “There exists in the world today a gigantic reservoir of good will toward us, the American people.”

— Wendell Willkie

26. “Emancipation came to the colored race in America as a war measure. It was an act of military necessity. Manifestly it would have come without war, in the slower process of humanitarian reform and social enlightenment.”

— Wendell Willkie

27. “I believe the moral losses of expediency always far outweigh the temporary gains.”

— Wendell Willkie

28. “No man has the right to use the great powers of the Presidency to lead the people, indirectly, into war.”

— Wendell Willkie

29. “But we cannot just take this historical fact for granted. We must make it live.”

— Wendell Willkie

30. “Free men are the strongest men.”

— Wendell Willkie

31. “It is, therefore, essential that we guard our own thinking and not be among those who cry out against prejudices applicable to themselves, while busy spawning intolerances for others.”

— Wendell Willkie

32. “American liberty is a religion. It is a thing of the spirit.”

— Wendell Willkie

33. “When we talk of freedom and opportunity for all nations, the mocking paradoxes in our own society become so clear they can no longer be ignored.”

— Wendell Willkie

34. “If the British Fleet were lost or captured, the Atlantic might be dominated by Germany, a power hostile to our way of life, controlling in that event most of the ships and shipbuilding facilities of Europe.”

— Wendell Willkie