Top 350 Woodrow Wilson Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

302. “I have found one can never get anything in life that is worth while without fighting for it.”

— Woodrow Wilson

303. “Any man that resists the present tides that run in the world, will find himself thrown upon a shore so high and barren that it will seem he has been separated from his human kind forever.”

— Woodrow Wilson

304. “So far as the colleges go, the sideshows are swallowing up the circus.”

— Woodrow Wilson

305. “I believe in human liberty as I believe in the wine of life. There is no salvation for men in the pitiful condescension of industrial masters. Guardians have no place in a land of freemen.”

— Woodrow Wilson

306. “Men grow by having responsibility laid upon them.”

— Woodrow Wilson

307. “And while you bring all countries with you, you come with a purpose of leaving all other countries behind you – bringing what is best of their spirit, but not looking over your shoulders and seeking to perpetuate what you intended to leave behind in them.”

— Woodrow Wilson

308. “Government is merely an attempt to express the conscience of everybody, the average conscience of the nation, in the rules that everybody is commanded to obey. That is all it is.”

— Woodrow Wilson

309. “In the last analysis, my fellow country men, as we in America would be the first to claim, a people are responsible for the acts of their government.”

— Woodrow Wilson

310. “We can afford to exercise the self-restraint of a really great nation which realizes its own strength and scorns to misuse it.”

— Woodrow Wilson

311. “When the representatives of “Big Business” think of the people, they do not include themselves.”

— Woodrow Wilson

312. “There’s not an idea in our heads that has not been worn shiny by someone else’s brains.”

— Woodrow Wilson

313. “Whatever may be said against the chewing of tobacco, this at least can be said of it, that it gives a man time to think between sentences.”

— Woodrow Wilson

314. “A right is worth fighting for only when it can be put into operation.”

— Woodrow Wilson

315. “I have no happy fairyland vision that she can win.”

— Woodrow Wilson

316. “Great statesmen seem to direct and rule by a sort of power to put themselves in the place of the nation over which they are set, and may thus be said to possess the souls of poets at the same time they display the coarser sense and the more vulgar sagacity of practical men of business.”

— Woodrow Wilson

317. “The law that will work is merely the summing up in legislative form of the moral judgment that the community has already reached.”

— Woodrow Wilson

318. “I am so glad that I am young, so that I may give my youth to you.”

— Woodrow Wilson

319. “No man can be just who is not free.”

— Woodrow Wilson

320. “The allied nations with the fullest concurrence of our government and people are agreed that in Palestine shall be laid the foundations of a Jewish Commonwealth.”

— Woodrow Wilson

321. “The literary gift is a very dangerous gift to possess if you are not telling the truth, and I would a great deal rather, for my part, have a man stumble in his speech than to feel he was so exceedingly smooth that he had better be watched both day and night.”

— Woodrow Wilson

322. “The natural man inevitably rebels against mathematics, a mild form of torture that could only be learned by painful processes of drill.”

— Woodrow Wilson

323. “Americanism consists in utterly believing in the principles of America.”

— Woodrow Wilson

324. “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.”

— Woodrow Wilson

325. “I had rather have everybody on my side than be armed to the teeth.”

— Woodrow Wilson

326. “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.”

— Woodrow Wilson

327. “From the dim morning hours of history when the father was king and priest down to this modern time of history’s high noon when nations stand forth full grown and self-governed, the law of coherence and continuity in political development has suffered no serious breach.”

— Woodrow Wilson

328. “I am not willing to be drawn further into the toils. I cannot accede to the acceptance of gifts upon terms which take the educational policy of the university out of the hands of the Trustees and Faculty and permit it to be determined by those who give money.”

— Woodrow Wilson

329. “We will presently find that we are not so far apart after all, that the points on which we differ are few and the points on which we agree are many, and that if we only have the patience and the candor and the desire to get together, we will get together.”

— Woodrow Wilson

330. “Things get very lonely in Washington sometimes. The real voice of the great people of America sometimes sounds faint and distant in that strange city. You hear politics until you wish that both parties were smothered in their own gas.”

— Woodrow Wilson

331. “Sciencehas won for us a great liberty in the physical world, a liberty from superstitious fear and from disease, a freedom touse nature as a familiar servant; but it has not freed us from ourselves.”

— Woodrow Wilson

332. “The interesting and inspiring thing about America is that she asks nothing for herself except what she has a right to ask for humanity itself.”

— Woodrow Wilson

333. “To do things today exactly the way you did them yesterday saves thinking.”

— Woodrow Wilson

334. “It does not become America that within her borders, where every man is free to follow the dictates of his conscience, men should raise the cry of church against church. To do that is to strike at the very spirit and heart of America.”

— Woodrow Wilson

335. “Excesses accomplish nothing. Disorder immediately defeats itself.”

— Woodrow Wilson

336. “I want the people to love me, but I suppose they never will.”

— Woodrow Wilson

337. “No task, rightly done, is truly private. It is part of the world s work.”

— Woodrow Wilson

338. “Never for a moment have I had one doubt about my religious beliefs. There are people who believe only so far as they can understand – that seems to me presumptuous and sets their understanding as the standard of the universe.”

— Woodrow Wilson

339. “The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickenswith the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”

— Woodrow Wilson

340. “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.”

— Woodrow Wilson

341. “What we seek is the reign of law, based upon the consent of the governed and sustained by the organized opinion of mankind.”

— Woodrow Wilson

342. “Statesmen have to bend to the collective will of their peoples or be broken.”

— Woodrow Wilson

343. “You cannot tear up ancient rootages and safely plant the tree of liberty in soil that is not native to it.”

— Woodrow Wilson

344. “This little world, this little state, this little commonwealth of our own...”

— Woodrow Wilson

345. “We are expected to put the utmost energy, of every power that we have, into the service of our fellow men, never sparing ourselves, not condescending to think of what is going to happen to ourselves, but ready, if need be, to go to the utter length of self-sacrifice.”

— Woodrow Wilson

346. “I have sometimes heard men say politics must have nothing to do with business, and I have often wished that business had nothing to do with politics.”

— Woodrow Wilson

347. “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.”

— Woodrow Wilson

348. “What every man seeks is satisfaction. He deceives himself so long as he imagines it to lie in self-indulgence.”

— Woodrow Wilson

349. “What is at the heart of all national problems? It is that we have seen the hand of material interest sometimes about to close upon our dearest rights and possessions.”

— Woodrow Wilson

350. “When I give a man an office, I watch him carefully to see whether he is swelling or growing.”

— Woodrow Wilson