Quotes from Woodrow Wilson

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

That a peasant may become king does not render the kingdom democratic.

The seed of revolution is repression.

I will not speak with disrespect of the Republican Party. I always speak with respect of the past.

Absolute identity with one's cause is the first and great condition of successful leadership.

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

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

The awakening of the people of China to the possibilities under free government is the most significant, if not the most momentous, event of our generation.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

If you think about what you ought to do for other people, your character will take care of itself.

When Andrew Jackson died someone asked a friend if he thought Old Hickory would go to heaven. 'He will if he wants to,' was the reply. On his death bed Disraeli declined a visit from Queen Victoria. 'No, it is better not', he said, 'she would only ask me to take a message to Albert.' I am a broken machine. I am ready to go.

The world must be made safe for democracy.

All things come to him who waits- provided he knows what he is waiting for.

A friend of mine says that 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.

No man ever saw a government. I live in the midst of the Government of the United States, but I never saw the Government of the United States.

Provision for others is a fundamental responsibility of human life.

A man's rootage is more important than his leafage.

You cannot, in human experience, rush into the light. You have to go through the twilight into the broadening day before the noon comes and the full sun is upon the landscape.

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.