Top 350 Woodrow Wilson Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “When correcting a child, the goal is to apply light, not heat.”

— Woodrow Wilson

102. “It is the object of learning, not only to satisfy the curiosity and perfect the spirits of ordinary men, but also to advance civilization.”

— Woodrow Wilson

103. “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.”

— Woodrow Wilson

104. “No student knows his subject: the most he knows is where and how to find out the things he does not know.”

— Woodrow Wilson

105. “High society is for those who have stopped working and no longer have anything important to do.”

— Woodrow Wilson

106. “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.”

— Woodrow Wilson

107. “This is history written in lightning.”

— Woodrow Wilson

108. “Reality is what I see, not what you see.”

— Woodrow Wilson

109. “The profession I chose was politics; the profession I entered was law. I entered the one because I thought it would lead to the other.”

— Woodrow Wilson

110. “One of the proofs of the divinity of our gospel is the preaching it has survived.”

— Woodrow Wilson

111. “We are in the presence of a new organization of society. Our life has broken away from the past.”

— Woodrow Wilson

112. “I am all kinds of a democrat, so far as I can discover but the root of the whole business is this, that I believe in the patriotism and energy and initiative of the average man.”

— Woodrow Wilson

113. “It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilizationitself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things we have always carried closest to our hearts.”

— Woodrow Wilson

114. “Genius is divine perseverance. Genius I cannot claim nor even extra brightness but perseverance all can have.”

— Woodrow Wilson

115. “The Bible is the one supreme source of revelation of the meaning of life, the nature of God and spiritual nature and need of men. It is the only guide of life which really leads the spirit in the way of peace and salvation.”

— Woodrow Wilson

116. “No man that does not see visions will ever realize any high hope or undertake any high enterprise.”

— Woodrow Wilson

117. “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation – until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.”

— Woodrow Wilson

118. “The method of political science is the interpretation of life; its instrument is insight, a nice understanding of subtle, unformulated conditions.”

— Woodrow Wilson

119. “The flag is the embodiment, not of sentiment, but of history.”

— Woodrow Wilson

120. “Today’s greatest labor-saving device is tomorrow.”

— Woodrow Wilson

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

— Woodrow Wilson

122. “Remember that God ordained that I should be the next president of the United States. Neither you nor any other mortal or mortals could have prevented this.”

— Woodrow Wilson

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

— Woodrow Wilson

124. “One cool judgement is worth a thousand hasty councils.”

— Woodrow Wilson

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

— Woodrow Wilson

126. “Thought cannot conceive of anything that may not be brought to expression. He who first uttered it may be only the suggester, but the doer will appear.”

— Woodrow Wilson

127. “In public affairs, stupidity is more dangerous than knavery, because it is harder to fight.”

— Woodrow Wilson

128. “Some people have a large circle of friends while others have only friends that they like.”

— Woodrow Wilson

129. “The only place in the world that nothing has to be explained to me is the South.”

— Woodrow Wilson

130. “We can have no sympathy with those who seek the power of government to advance their own personal interests or ambitions.”

— Woodrow Wilson

131. “We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the world.”

— Woodrow Wilson

132. “I have always been among those who believed that the greatest freedom of speech was the greatest safety, because if a man is a fool, the best thing to do is to encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking.”

— Woodrow Wilson

133. “A man’s rootage is more important than his leafage.”

— Woodrow Wilson

134. “Leadership does not always wear the harness of compromise.”

— Woodrow Wilson

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

— Woodrow Wilson

136. “A nation is as great, and only as great, as her rank and file.”

— Woodrow Wilson

137. “Character is a by-product; it is produced in the great manufacture of daily duty.”

— Woodrow Wilson

138. “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.”

— Woodrow Wilson

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

— Woodrow Wilson

140. “America is the only idealistic nation in the world.”

— Woodrow Wilson

141. “The rule for every man is, not to depend on the education which other men have prepared for him-not even to consent to it; but to strive to see things as they are, and to be himself as he is. Defeat lies in self-surrender.”

— Woodrow Wilson

142. “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.”

— Woodrow Wilson

143. “No nation is fit to sit in judgement upon any other nation.”

— Woodrow Wilson

144. “Liberty is its own reward.”

— Woodrow Wilson

145. “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 swelling or growing. The mischief of it is that when they swell, they do not swell enough to burst.”

— Woodrow Wilson

146. “I’m a vague, conjunctured personality, more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles.”

— Woodrow Wilson

147. “When men take up arms to set other men free, there is something sacred and holy in the warfare.”

— Woodrow Wilson

148. “A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American. And the man who goes among you to trade upon your nationality is no worthy son to live under the Stars and Stripes.”

— Woodrow Wilson

149. “Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence is a practical document for the use of practical men. It is not a thesis for philosophers, but a whip for tyrants; it is not a theory of government but a program of action.”

— Woodrow Wilson

150. “Some Americans need hyphens in their names, because only part of them has come over; but when the whole man has come over, heart and thought and all, the hyphen drops of its own weight out of his name.”

— Woodrow Wilson