Woodrow Wilson

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

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.

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.

Caution is the confidential agent of selfishness.

By 'radical,' I understand one who goes too far; by 'conservative,' one who does not go far enough; by 'reactionary,' one who won't go at all.

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

The seed of revolution is repression.

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

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.

America was established not to create wealth but to realize a vision, to realize an ideal - to discover and maintain liberty among men.

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

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

A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.

Government ought to be all outside and no inside. . . . Everybody knows that corruption thrives in secret places, and avoids public places, and we believe it a fair presumption that secrecy means impropriety.

No student knows his subject: the most he knows is where and how to find out the things he does not know

One cannot pay the price of self-respect.

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

There has been something crude and heartless and unfeeling in our haste to suceed and be great. Our thought has been 'Let every man look out for himself, let every generation look out for itself,' while we reared giant machinery which made it impossible that any but those who stood at the levers of control should have a chance to look out for themselves.

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.

No one who has read official documents needs to be told how easy it is to conceal the essential truth under the apparently candid and all- disclosing phrases of a voluminous and particularizing report.

The Civil War created in this country what had never existed before - a national consciousness. It was not the salvation of the Union; it was the rebirth of the Union.