Top 350 Woodrow Wilson Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “The immortality of Thomas Jefferson does not lie in any one of his achievements, or in the series of his achievements, but in his attitude towards mankind and the conception which he sought to realize in action of the service owed by America to the rest of the world... Thomas Jefferson was a great leader of men because he understood and interpreted the spirits of men.”

— Woodrow Wilson

252. “God knows that any man who would seek the presidency of the United States is a fool for his pains. The burden is all but intolerable, and the things that I have to do are just as much as the human spirit can carry.”

— Woodrow Wilson

253. “The light that shined upon the summit now seems almost to shine at our feet.”

— Woodrow Wilson

254. “That is Gladstone, the greatest statesman that ever lived. I intend to be a statesman, too.”

— Woodrow Wilson

255. “Tolerance is an admirable intellectual gift; but it is of little worth in politics.”

— Woodrow Wilson

256. “An evident principleis the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak.”

— Woodrow Wilson

257. “The Government of the United States would be constrained to hold the Imperial German government to a strict accountability for such acts of their naval authorities.”

— Woodrow Wilson

258. “The commands of democracy are as imperative as its privileges and opportunities are wide and generous. Its compulsion is upon us.”

— Woodrow Wilson

259. “Liberty does not consist in mere declarations of the rights of man. It consists in the translation of those declarations into definite action.”

— Woodrow Wilson

260. “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.”

— Woodrow Wilson

261. “I want to re-echo my hope that we may all work together for a great peace as distinguished from a mean peace.”

— Woodrow Wilson

262. “A living thing is born.”

— Woodrow Wilson

263. “No man can sit down and withhold his hands from the warfare against wrong and get peace from his acquiescence.”

— Woodrow Wilson

264. “The things that the flag stands for were created by the experiences of a great people. Everything that it stands for was written by their lives. The flag is the embodiment, not of sentiment, but of history.”

— Woodrow Wilson

265. “I have the feeling that he would rather see a good cause fail than succeed if he were not the head of it.”

— Woodrow Wilson

266. “I believe very profoundly in an over-ruling Providence, and I do not fear that any real plans can be thrown off the track. It maynot be intended that I shall be President – but that would not break my heart.”

— Woodrow Wilson

267. “We grow through our dreams. All great men and women are dreamers. Some, however, allow their dreams to die. You should nurse your dreams and protect them through bad times and tough times to the sunshine and light which always come.”

— Woodrow Wilson

268. “They do not need our praise. They do not need that our admiration should sustain them. There is no immortality that is safer than theirs. We come not for their sakes but for our own, in order that we may drink at the same springs of inspiration from which they themselves drank.”

— Woodrow Wilson

269. “There are times when words seem empty and only actions seem great. Such a time has come, and in the Providence of God America will once more have an opportunity to show the world that she was born to save mankind.”

— Woodrow Wilson

270. “Every great man of business has got somewhere a touch of the idealist in him.”

— Woodrow Wilson

271. “A man may be defeated by his own secondary successes.”

— Woodrow Wilson

272. “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.”

— Woodrow Wilson

273. “Understanding is the soil in which grow all the fruits of friendship.”

— Woodrow Wilson

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

— Woodrow Wilson

275. “All things come to him who waits.”

— Woodrow Wilson

276. “The success of a party means little more than that the Nation is using the party for a large and definite purpose. It seeks to use and interpret a change in its own plans and point of view.”

— Woodrow Wilson

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

— Woodrow Wilson

278. “It is not men that interest or disturb me primarily; it is ideas. Ideas live; men die.”

— Woodrow Wilson

279. “The way to be patriotic in America is not only to love America, but to love the duty that lies nearest to our hand, and to know that in performing it we are serving our country.”

— Woodrow Wilson

280. “I believe that soldiers will bear me out in saying that both come in time of battle. I take it that the moral courage comes in going into the battle, and the physical courage in staying in.”

— Woodrow Wilson

281. “The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation.”

— Woodrow Wilson

282. “No peace can last, or ought to last, which does not recognize and accept the principle that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that no right anywhere exists to hand peoples from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were property.”

— Woodrow Wilson

283. “We want the spirit of America to be efficient; we want American character to be efficient; we want American character to display itself in what I may, perhaps, be allowed to call spiritual efficiency – clear disinterested thinking and fearless action.”

— Woodrow Wilson

284. “The most conservative persons I ever met are college undergraduates.”

— Woodrow Wilson

285. “Death comes along like a gas bill one can’t payand that’s all one can sayabout it.”

— Woodrow Wilson

286. “No government has ever been beneficent when the attitude of government was that it was taking care of the people. The only freedom consists in the people taking care of the government.”

— Woodrow Wilson

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

— Woodrow Wilson

288. “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.”

— Woodrow Wilson

289. “Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of the government. The history of government is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of government, not the increase of it.”

— Woodrow Wilson

290. “A presidential campaign may easily degenerate into a mere personal contest, and so lose its real dignity. There is no indispensable man.”

— Woodrow Wilson

291. “You devour a book meant to be read, not because you would fill yourself or have an anxious care to be nourished, but because it contains such stuff as it makes the mind hungry to look upon.”

— Woodrow Wilson

292. “Here lies, in a “horizontal” position The “outside” case of Peter Pendulum, watch-maker. He departed this life “wound up” In hopes of being “taken in hand” by his Maker, And of being thoroughly “cleaned, repaired” and “set a-going” In the world to come.”

— Woodrow Wilson

293. “Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at.”

— Woodrow Wilson

294. “I have always in my own thought summed up individual liberty, and business liberty, and every other kind of liberty, in the phrase that is common in the sporting world, ‘A free field and no favor.’”

— Woodrow Wilson

295. “As a matter of fact and experience, the more power is divided the more irresponsible it becomes.”

— Woodrow Wilson

296. “If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it; what we have to determine now is whether we are big enough, whether we are men enough, whether we are free enough, to take possession again of the government which is our own.”

— Woodrow Wilson

297. “If I cannot retain my moral influence over a man except by occasionally knocking him down, if that is the only basis upon which he will respect me, then for the sake of his soul I have got occasionally to knock him down.”

— Woodrow Wilson

298. “America is the place where you cannot kill your government by killing the men who conduct it.”

— Woodrow Wilson

299. “If you think too much about being re-elected, it is very difficult to be worth re-electing.”

— Woodrow Wilson

300. “The men who act stand nearer to the mass of man than the men who write; and it is in their hands that new thought gets its translation into the crude language of deeds.”

— Woodrow Wilson