Woodrow Wilson

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Dr. Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856 – February 3, 1924) was the 45th state Governor of New Jersey (1911-1913) and later the 28th President of the United States (1913-1921). He was the second Democrat to serve two consecutive terms in the White House, after Andrew Jackson.

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• Power consists in one's capacity to link his will with the purpose of others, to lead by reason and a gift of cooperation.
  • From a letter to Mary A. Hulbert (September 21, 1913)

• The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name...We must be impartial in thought as well as in action.
  • Message to the Senate (August 19, 1914)

• You deal in the raw material of opinion, and, if my convictions have any validity, opinion ultimately governs the world.
  • Address to the Associated Press (April 20, 1915)

• No nation is fit to sit in judgement upon any other nation.
  • Speech in New York City (April 20, 1915)

• There is no such thing as a man being too proud to fight.
  • Address to Foreign-Born Citizens (May 10, 1915)

• [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.
  • Memorial Day Address (1915)

• The flag is the embodiment, not of sentiment, but of history. It represents the experiences made my men and women, the experiences of those who do and live under that flag.
  • Address (June 14, 1915)

• We have stood apart, studiously neutral.
  • Message to Congress (December 7, 1915)

• America cannot be an ostrich with its head in the sand.
  • Speech at Des Moines (February 1, 1916)

• There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace.
  • Address to the Senate (January 22, 1917)

• It must be a peace without victory...Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor's terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last.
  • Address to the Senate (January 22, 1917)

• A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible.
  • Statement made in reference to certain members of the Senate (March 4, 1917)

• The supreme test of the nation has come. We must all speak, act, and serve together!
  • Proclamation to the American People (April 15, 1917)

• Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world.
  • Address at Sioux Falls (September 8, 1919)

• I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it.
  • League of Nations Address (September 25, 1919)

• The highest and best form of efficiency is the spontaneous cooperation of a free people.
  • From Bernard Baruch's American Industry at War: A Report of the War Industries Board (March 1921)

• The great malady of public life is cowardice. Most men are not untrue, but they are afraid. Most of the errors of public life, if my observation is to be trusted, come not because men are morally bad, but because they are afraid of somebody. God knows why they should be: it is generally shadows they are afraid of.
  • Ray Stannard Baker, American Chronicle, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1945, quoted on unnumbered page opposite p. 1.

Address to Congress, asking for a declaration of war (April 2, 1917)

• Armed neutrality is ineffectual enough at best.

• The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.

• It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free. To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.

Fourteen Points Speech (January 8, 1918)

• All the peoples of the world are in effect partners in this interest, and for our own part we see very clearly that unless justice be done to others it will not be done to us.

• 1. Open covenants of peace must be arrived at.

• 2. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war.

• 5. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims.

• 14. A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.

Attributed

• A conservative is a man who sits and thinks, mostly sits.

• A conservative is someone who makes no changes and consults his grandmother when in doubt.

• America is not anything if it consists of each of us. It is something only if it consists of all of us.

• America was established not to create wealth but to realize a vision, to realize an ideal - to discover and maintain liberty among men.

• 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.

• At every crisis in one's life, it is absolute salvation to have some sympathetic friend to whom you can think aloud without restraint or misgiving.

• Because I love the South, I rejoice in the failure of the Confederacy.

• Business underlies everything in our national life, including our spiritual life. Witness the fact that in the Lord's Prayer, the first petition is for daily bread. No one can worship God or love his neighbor on an empty stomach.

• 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.

• Friendship is the only cement that will ever hold the world together.

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

• 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.

• I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow.

• 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.

• I would rather lose in a cause that will some day win, than win in a cause that will some day lose.

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

• If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.

• If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it.

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

• If you want to make enemies, try to change something.

• Just what is it that America stands for? If she stands for one thing more than another it is for the sovereignty of self-governing people.

• 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.

• Loyalty means nothing unless it has at its heart the absolute principle of self-sacrifice.

• Never attempt to murder a man who is committing suicide.

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

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

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

• Once lead this people into war and they will forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.

• One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty counsels. The thing to do is to supply light and not heat.

• One of the proofs of the divinity of our gospel is the preaching it has survived.

• 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.

• Prosperity is necessarily the first theme of a political campaign.

• The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation.

• The ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people.

• The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.

• The history of liberty is a history of resistance.

• The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.

• The nation's honor is dearer than the nation's comfort; yes, than the nation's life itself.

• The seed of revolution is repression.

• The sum of the whole matter is this, that our civilization cannot survive materially unless it be redeemed spiritually.

• The way to stop financial joy-riding is to arrest the chauffeur, not the automobile.

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

• 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.

• There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.

• There is no higher religion than human service. To work for the common good is the greatest creed.

• Uncompromising thought is the luxury of the closeted recluse.

• We are not put in this world to sit still and know; we are put into it to act.

• We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers. They see things in the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter's evening. Some of us let these dreams die, but others nourish and protect them; nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light which comes always to those who hope that their dreams will come true.

• We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

• 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 along the right lines of thought.

• You are not here merely to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world. You impoverish yourself if you forget this errand.

External links

• Works by Woodrow Wilson at Project Gutenberg
• First Inaugural Address
• Second Inaugural Address
• President Wilson's War Address
• Woodrow Wilson Biography
• Woodrow Wilson Links

Related Wikimedia links

• Treaty of Versailles
• First World War
• The Progressive Era
• Racial Segregationbg:Удроу Уилсън

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