Woodrow Wilson

Their ignorance and credulity made them easy dupes.

It was a menace to society itself that the negroes should thus of a sudden be set free and left without tutelage or restraint.

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.

We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform …

The only thing that has ever distinguished America among the nations is that she has shown that all men are entitled to the benefits of the law.

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.

The only reason I read a book is because I cannot see and converse with the man who wrote it.

[W]e are not bound to adhere to the doctrine held by the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

We are not put into this world to sit still and know; we are put into it to act. It is true that in order to learn men must for a little while withdraw from action, must seek some quiet place of remove from the bustle of affairs, where …

No doubt a lot of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual, and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle.

It was necessary to put the South at a moral disadvantage by transforming the contest from a war waged against States fighting for their independence to a war against States fighting for the maintenance and extension of slavery, by making …

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.

Adventurers swarmed out of the North, as much the enemies of one race as of the other, to cozen, beguile and use the negroes. The white men were aroused by a mere instinct of self-preservation — until at last there sprung into existence a …

Nothing is easier than to falsify the past. Lifeless instruction will do it. If you rob it of vitality, stiffen it with pedantry, sophisticate it with argument, chill it with unsympathetic comment, you render it as dead as any academic …

The object of education is not merely to draw out the powers of the individual mind: it is rather its right object to draw all minds to a proper adjustment to the physical and social world in which they are to have their life and their …

Negro rule under unscrupulous adventurers had been finally put an end to in the South, and the natural, inevitable ascendancy of the whites, the responsible class, established.

It has never been natural, it has seldom been possible, in this country for learning to seek a place apart and hold aloof from affairs. It is only when society is old, long settled to its ways, confident in habit, and without …

Uncompromising thought is the luxury of the closeted recluse.

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

The English race, consequently, has long and successfully studied the art of curbing executive power to the constant neglect of the art of perfecting executive methods. It has exercised itself much more in controlling than in energizing …

The principles on which to base a science of administration for America, must be principles which have democratic policy very much at heart.

Administration is the most obvious part of government; it is government in action; it is the executive, the operative, the most visible side of government, and is of course as old as government itself.

It is getting to be harder to run a constitution than to frame one.

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 great dreams die, but others nourish and protect them; nurse them …