"And let me again remind you that it is only by working with an energy which is almost superhuman and which looks to uninterested spectators like insanity that we can accomplish anything worth the achievement."--Undergraduate essay, "The Ideal Statesman"


"Tolerance is an admirable intellectual gift; but it is worth little in politics. Politics is a war of causes; a joust of principles."--Wilson at age 21


"I have a sense of power in dealing with men collectively which I do not always feel in dealing with them singly.... One feels no sacrifice of pride necessary in courting the favor of an assembly of men such as he would have to make in seeking to please one man."--Wilson at age 27


 “Government, in its last analysis, is organized force”. The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics 1889


"Of course, when all is said, it is not learning but the spirit of service that will give a college place in the public annals of the nation." -- Professor at Princeton, 1896


"The business of government is to organize the common interest against the special interests."--1912


“The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it”.--Address to New York Press Club, September 9, 1912

"A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit.  Our system of credit is privately concentrated.  The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men who, even if their action be honest and intended for the public interest, are necessarily concentrated upon the great undertakings in which their own money is involved and who necessarily, by very reason of their own limitations, chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom."
Excerpt from 1912 campaign speech

"We have restricted credit, we have restricted opportunity, we have controlled development, and we have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world--no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men." Excerpt frpm 1912 campaign speech

"Power consists in one's capacity to link his will with the purpose of others, to lead by reason and a gift of cooperation.--letter to Mary A. Hulbert, September 21, 1913


"No nation is fit to sit in judgment upon any other nation."--Speech in New York, Apr. 20, 1915

"The basis of neutrality is sympathy for mankind."--Speech in New York, Apr. 20, 1915


"There is such a thing as a 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."--Speech in Philadelphia, May 10, 1915


"We are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false pretense about them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included; for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience. The world must be made safe for democracy....It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts."--Declaration of war against Germany, Apr. 2, 1917


"Better a thousand times to go down fighting than to dip your colors to dishonorable compromise."--Wilson to his wife, 1919


"My constant embarrassment is to restrain the emotions that are inside of me. You may not believe it, but I sometimes feel like the fire from a far from extinct volcano, and if the lava does not seem to spill over it is because you are not high enough to see into the basin and see the caldron boil."--Comment at presidential press conference


"If I said what I thought about those fellows in Congress, it would take a piece of asbestos two inches thick to hold it."--On Senate opponents of the Versailles Treaty, Aug. 12, 1919

"Again and again mothers who lost their sons in France have come to me, and, taking my hand, have not only shed tears upon it, but they have added, `God bless you, Mr. President!" Why should they pray God to bless me? I advised the Congress to create the situation that led to the death of their sons. I ordered their sons overseas. I consented to their sons' being put in the most difficult part of the battle line, where death was certain...Why should they weep upon my hand and call down the blessings of God upon me? Because they believe that their boys died for something that vastly transcends any of the immediate and palpable objects of the war. They believe, and rightly believe, that their sons saved the liberty of the world."--Speech in Pueblo, Colo., September, 1919

"My fellow citizens, I believe in Divine Providence. If I did not I would go crazy."--Sept. 17, 1919, one week before his collapse