Quotes from Woodrow Wilson

Once you lead [the] people into war, they will forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. The spirit of ruthless brutality will enter every fiber of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street.

We have not given science too big a place in our education, but we have made a perilous mistake in giving it too great a preponderance in method in every other branch of study.

if Germany won it would change the course of our civilization and make the United States a military nation [and] it would check his policy for a better international ethical code

If a dog will not come to you after he has looked you in the face, you should go home and examine your conscience."~

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. But we shall not be poor if we love liberty, because the nation that loves liberty truly sets every man free to do his best and be his best.

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

No one set of interests can safely be suffered to dominate the country.

Movies are] like writing history with lightning.

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

You are here to enrich the world and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.

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.

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.

If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it.

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.

How is the schoolmaster, the nation, to know which boy needs the whipping?

We wish companionship and renewal of spirit, enrichment of thought and the full adventure of the mind; and we desire fair company, and a larger world in which to find them.

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

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. Neither do you read it to kill time, but to lengthen time, rather, adding to its natural usury by living the more abundantly while it lasts, joining another's life and thought to your own.

Caucasian laborers could not compete with the Chinese, could not live upon a handful of rice and work for a pittance, and found themselves being steadily crowded out from occupation after occupation by the thrifty, skillful Orientals, who, with their yellow skin and strange, debasing habits of life, seemed to them hardly fellow men at all, but evil spirit, rather.

The use of a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible. ["The Power of Christian Young Men", Address at the Young Men's Christian Association's Celebration, Pittsburgh, October 24, 1914]

There must be, not a balance of power but a community power; not organized rivalries but a organized, common peace.

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

He is not a true man of the world who knows only the present fashions of it.

Never attempt to murder a man who is committing suicide.