Woodrow Wilson
The Americans who went to Europe to die are a unique breed.... (They) crossed the seas to a foreign land to fight for a cause which they did not pretend was peculiarly their own, which they knew was the cause of humanity and mankind. These Americans gave the greatest of all gifts, the gift of life and the gift of spirit.Collection: Fighting
It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilizationitself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things we have always carried closest to our hearts.Collection: War
Understanding is the soil in which grow all the fruits of friendship.Collection: Understanding
Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must develop. All that progressives ask or desire is permission-in an era when 'development,' 'evolution,' is the scientific word-to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.Collection: Law
What every man seeks is satisfaction. He deceives himself so long as he imagines it to lie in self-indulgence.Collection: Lying
No thoughtful man ever came to the end of his life, and had time and a little space of calm from which to look back upon it, who did not know and acknowledge that it was what he had done unselfishly and for others, and nothing else, that satisfied him in the retrospect, and made him feel that he had played the man.Collection: Love
You have just taken an oath of allegiance to the United States. Of allegiance to whom? Of allegiance to no one, unless it be God. Certainly not of allegiance to those who temporarily represent this great government. You have taken an oath of allegiance to a great ideal, to a great body of principles, to a great hope of the human race.Collection: Taken
Energy in a nation is like sap in a tree; it rises from bottom up.Collection: Tree
There is such a thing as man being too proud to fight. 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.Collection: War
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.Collection: Men
One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty councils. The thing to do is to supply light and not heat. Ay any rate, if it is heat it ought to be white heat and not sputter, because sputtering heat is apt to spread the fire. There ought, if there is any heat at all, to be that warmth of the heart which makes every man thrust aside his own personal feeling, his own personal interest, and take thought of the welfare and benefit of others.Collection: Heart
The firm basis of government is justice, not pity.Collection: Government
Today, supremely, it behooves us to remember that a nation shall be saved by the power that sleeps in its own bosom; or by none; shall be renewed in hope, in confidence, in strength by waters welling up from its own sweet, perennial springs. Not from above; not by patronage of its aristocrats. The flower does not bear the root, but the root the flower.Collection: Sweet
The greatest and truest models for all oratorsis Demosthenes. One who has not studied deeply and constantly all the great speeches of the great Athenian, is not prepared to speak in public. Only as the constant companion of Demosthenes, Burke, Fox, Canning and Webster, can we hope to become orators.Collection: Oratory
If you would be a leader of men you must lead your own generation, not the next. Your playing must be good now, while the play ison the boards and the audience in the seats.... It will not get you the repute of a good actor to have excellencies discovered in you afterwards.Collection: Leadership
The only thing that saves the world is the little handful of disinterested men that are in it.Collection: Men
We [Americans] have a great ardor for gain; but we have a deep passion for the rights of man.Collection: Passion
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.Collection: Government
So far as the colleges go, the side-shows have swallowed up the circus, and we don't know what is going on in the main tent: and I don't want to continue as ringmaster under those conditions.Collection: College
Tolerance is an admirable intellectual gift; but it is of little worth in politics.Collection: Tolerance
Settlements may be temporary, but the action of the nations in the interest of peace and justice must be permanent. We can set up permanent processes. We may not be able to set up permanent decisions.Collection: Peace
I am one who fights without a knack of hoping confidentlysimply a Scotch-Irishman who will not be conquered.Collection: Fighting
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.Collection: Believe
Once lead this people into war, and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight, you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fiber of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street.Collection: War
I want to re-echo my hope that we may all work together for a great peace as distinguished from a mean peace.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Heart
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 actionCollection: Spiritual
The only way your powers can become great is by exerting them outside the circle of your own narrow, special, selfish interests. And that is the reason of Christianity. Christ came into the world to save others, not to save himself; and no man is a true Christian who does not think constantly of how he can lift his brother, how he can assist his friend, how he can enlighten mankind, how he can make virtue the rule of conduct in the circle in which he lives.Collection: Christian
The greatest embarrassment of my political career has been that active duties seem to deprive me of time for careful investigation. I seem almost obliged to form conclusions from impressions instead of from study.... I wish that I had more knowledge, more thorough acquaintance, with the matters involved.Collection: Careers
The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name.... We must be impartial in thought as well as in actiona nationthat neither sits in judgment upon others nor is disturbed in her own counsels and which keeps herself fit and free to do what is honest and disinterested and truly serviceable for the peace of the world.Collection: Names
I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Pain
Leadership does not always wear the harness of compromise. Once and again one of those great influences which we call a Cause arises in the midst of a nation. Men of strenuous minds and high ideals come forward.... The attacks they sustain are more cruel than the collision of arms.... Friends desert and despise them.... They stand alone and oftentimes are made bitter by their isolation.... They are doing nothing less than defy public opinion, and shall they convert it by blows. Yes.Collection: Leadership
You must act in your friends' interests whether it pleases them or not; the object of love is to serve, not to win.Collection: Love
This is history written in lightning.Collection: Lightning
People will endure their tyrants for years, but they tear their deliverers to pieces if a millennium is not created immediately.Collection: Years
The Constitution of the United States is not a mere lawyers' document. It is a vehicle of life, and its spirit is always the spirit of the age. Its prescriptions are clear and we know what they arebut life is always your last and most authoritative critic.Collection: Age
The facts of the case will always have the better of [an] argument.Collection: Facts
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.Collection: Country
The highest and best form of efficiency is the spontaneous cooperation of a free people.Collection: Inspirational
Nothing was ever done so systematically as nothing is being done now.Collection: Procrastination
We live in an age disturbed, confused, bewildered, afraid of its own forces, in search not merely of its road but even of its directionCollection: Confused
They lived long that have lived well.Collection: Long
Justice, and only justice, shall always be our motto.Collection: Justice
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.Collection: Faith
I firmly believe in Divine Providence. Without belief in Providence I think I should go crazy. Without God the world would be a maze without a clue.Collection: Crazy
No man has ever risen to the stature of spiritual manhood until he has found that it is finer to serve somebody else than it is to serve himself.Collection: Spiritual
The world must be made safe for democracy.Collection: Presidential
I can imagine no greater disservice to the country than to establish a system of censorship that would deny to the people of a free republic like our own their indisputable right to criticize their own public officials. While exercising the great powers of the office I hold, I would regret in a crisis like the one through which we are now passing to lose the benefit of patriotic and intelligent criticism.Collection: Country