Top 350 Woodrow Wilson Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.”

— Woodrow Wilson

52. “Congress in session is Congress on public exhibition, whilst Congress in its committee-rooms is Congress at work.”

— Woodrow Wilson

53. “The use of a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible.”

— Woodrow Wilson

54. “I firmly believe in Divine Providence. Without belief in Providence I think I should go crazy. Without God the world would be a maze without a clue.”

— Woodrow Wilson

55. “Progressiveness means not standing still when everything else is moving.”

— Woodrow Wilson

56. “We must believe the things We teach our children.”

— Woodrow Wilson

57. “Fear God and you need not fear anyone else.”

— Woodrow Wilson

58. “If you will think about what you ought to do for other people, your character will take care of itself. Character is a by-product, and any man who devotes himself to its cultivation in his own case will become a selfish prig.”

— Woodrow Wilson

59. “If you’ve made up your mind you can do something, you’re absolutely RIGHT.”

— Woodrow Wilson

60. “There is a price which is too great to pay for peace, and that price can be put in one word. One cannot pay the price of self-respect.”

— Woodrow Wilson

61. “We are not put into this world to sit still and know; we are put into it to act.”

— Woodrow Wilson

62. “The man who reads everything is like the man who eats everything: he can digest nothing, and the penalty of crowding one’s mind with other men’s thoughts is to have no thoughts of one’s own.”

— Woodrow Wilson

63. “Conformity will be the only virtue and any man who refuses to conform will have to pay the penalty.”

— Woodrow Wilson

64. “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.”

— Woodrow Wilson

65. “Not all change is progress.”

— Woodrow Wilson

66. “The great monopoly in this country is the money monopoly. So long as it exists, our old variety of freedom and individual energy of development are out of the question.”

— Woodrow Wilson

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

— Woodrow Wilson

68. “People will endure their tyrants for years, but they tear their deliverers to pieces if a millennium is not created immediately.”

— Woodrow Wilson

69. “No man can worship God or love his neighbor on an empty stomach.”

— Woodrow Wilson

70. “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.”

— Woodrow Wilson

71. “The highest and best form of efficiency is the spontaneous cooperation of a free people.”

— Woodrow Wilson

72. “I am sorry for men who do not read the Bible every day. I wonder why they deprive themselves of the strength and pleasure.”

— Woodrow Wilson

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

— Woodrow Wilson

74. “There is here a great melting pot in which we must compound a precious metal. That metal is the metal of nationality.”

— Woodrow Wilson

75. “An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of Democracy.”

— Woodrow Wilson

76. “Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.”

— Woodrow Wilson

77. “Music says nothing to the reason: it is a kind of closely structured nonsense.”

— Woodrow Wilson

78. “The Civil War created in this country what had never existed before – a national consciousness. It was not the salvation of the Union; it was the rebirth of the Union.”

— Woodrow Wilson

79. “Big business is not dangerous because it is big, but because its bigness is an unwholesome inflation created by privileges and exemptions which it ought not to enjoy.”

— Woodrow Wilson

80. “I am sorry for those that disagree with me because I know that they are wrong.”

— Woodrow Wilson

81. “Hunger does not breed reform; it breeds madness and all the distemper’s that make an ordered life impossible.”

— Woodrow Wilson

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

— Woodrow Wilson

83. “It would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.”

— Woodrow Wilson

84. “I believe in Democracy because it releases the energies of every human being.”

— Woodrow Wilson

85. “The sum of the whole matter is this – our civilization cannot survive materially unless it be redeemed spiritually.”

— Woodrow Wilson

86. “To fight, you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fibre of national life...”

— Woodrow Wilson

87. “Settlements may be temporary, but the action of the nations in the interest of peace and justice must be permanent. We can set up permanent processes. We may not be able to set up permanent decisions.”

— Woodrow Wilson

88. “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”

— Woodrow Wilson

89. “We grow by our dreams.”

— Woodrow Wilson

90. “Provision for others is a fundamental responsibility of human life.”

— Woodrow Wilson

91. “America was established not to create wealth but to realize a vision, to realize an ideal – to discover and maintain liberty among men.”

— Woodrow Wilson

92. “You cannot be friends upon any other terms than upon the terms of equality.”

— Woodrow Wilson

93. “No man ever saw a government. I live in the midst of the Government of the United States, but I never saw the Government of the United States.”

— Woodrow Wilson

94. “Energy in a nation is like sap in a tree; it rises from bottom up.”

— Woodrow Wilson

95. “The fewer the desires, the more peace.”

— Woodrow Wilson

96. “It recognizes no morality but a sham morality meant for deceit, no honor even among thieves and of a thievish sort, no force but physical force, no intellectual power but cunning, no disgrace but failure, no crime but stupidity.”

— Woodrow Wilson

97. “The right is more precious than peace.”

— Woodrow Wilson

98. “The man who disparages music as a luxury and non-essential is doing the nation an injury. Music now, more than ever before, is a national need.”

— Woodrow Wilson

99. “The only thing that saves the world is the little handful of disinterested men that are in it.”

— Woodrow Wilson

100. “A sure sign of an amateur is too much detail to compensate for too little life.”

— Woodrow Wilson