Woodrow Wilson

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

I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men.

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.

You cannot be friends upon any other terms than upon the terms of equality.

You are not here merely to prepare 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, and you impoverish yourself …

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

Power consists in one's capacity to link his will with the purpose of others, to lead by reason and a gift of cooperation.

The success of a party means little except when the Nation is using that party for a large and definite purpose.

There can be no equality or opportunity, the first essential of justice in the body politic, if men and women and children be not shielded in their lives, their very vitality, from the consequences of great industrial and social processes …

Mr. House is my second personality. He is my independent self. His thoughts and mine are one. If I were in his place I would do just as he suggested.

Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of the government. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not …

I would … rather lose in a cause that I know some day will triumph than triumph in a cause that I know some day will lose.

Liberty is its own reward.

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

You know that it was Jefferson who said that the best government is that which does as little governing as possible…. But that time is passed. America is not now and cannot in the future be a place for unrestricted individual enterprise.

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.

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.

Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned. They are not units but fractions; with their individuality and independence of choice in matters of business they have lost all …

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

RADICAL—one who goes too far. CONSERVATIVE—one who does not go far enough. REACTIONARY—one who does not go at all.

The great voice of America does not come from the seats of learning, but in a murmur from the hills and the woods and the farms and the factories and the mills, rolling on and gaining volume until it comes to us the voice from the homes of …

It was plain to see that the trouble in the southern States arose out of the exclusion of the better whites from the electoral suffrage no less than from the admission of the most ignorant blacks.

Every country-side wished to have its own Ku Klux, founded in secrecy and mystery like the mother ‘Den’ at Pulaski, until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, an ‘Invisible Empire of the South,’ bound together in …

The white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes and conducted in the interest …