An evident principle ... is the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak.

(Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), U.S. president. Address to Congress declaring the Fourteen Points (January 8, 1918).)

They [the children] live in a world of delightful imagination; they pursue persons and objects that never existed; they make an Argosy laden with gold out of a floating butterfly,?and these stupid [grown-up people] try to translate these things into uninteresting facts.

(Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), U.S. president. Address, October 13, 1904, in Pittsburgh. The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 15, p. 510, ed. Arthur S. Link.)

His mind was strong and clear, his will was unwavering, his convictions were uncompromising, his imagination was powerful enough to invest all plans of national policy with a poetic charm.

(Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), U.S. president. "William Earl Chatham," The Nassau Literary Magazine (October 1878). The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 1 p. 409, ed. Arthur S. Link. In this youthful essay Wilson might have been describing his own future as a statesman?before age and illness overcame him.)

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

(Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), U.S. president. Address to the country (March 4, 1917). Wilson was speaking of a filibuster in the Senate that was holding up the wartime Shipping Bill.)

I lived a dream life (almost too exclusively, perhaps) when I was a lad and even now my thought goes back for refreshment to those days when all the world seemed to be a place of heroic adventure in which one's heart must keep its own counsel.

(Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), U.S. president. Letter, July 30, 1911, to Mary A.P. Hulbert. The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 23, p. 240, ed. Arthur S. Link.)

My hope is ... that we may recover ... something of a renewal of that vision of the law with which men may be supposed to have started out with in the old days of the oracles, who communed with the intimations of divinity.

(Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), U.S. president. Address to the American Bar Association (October 20, 1914). Wilson was speaking at the start of World War I, amid what he called "the extraordinary circumstances of the world in which we live.")

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.

(Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), U.S. president. The New Freedom, p. 88 (1913).)

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.

(Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), U.S. president. Remarks, November 12, 1914, to a delegation of African Americans at the White House. The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 31, p. 501, ed. Arthur S. Link. Wilson was in a dialogue with African-American civil rights leaders led by William M. Trotter. Wilson felt his tolerating segregation in the federal government was forced upon him by a Democratic party dominated by Southern segregationists.)

Open covenants of peace openly arrived at

(Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), U.S. president. Address to Congress declaring the Fourteen Points (January 6, 1918). Wilson later explained that the famous phrase did not preclude private negotiations. What was important was that the results be public.)

There is little for the great part of the history of the world except the bitter tears of pity and the hot tears of wrath.

(Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), U.S. president. Address, September 13, 1919, at Oakland, California. Wilson was speaking extemporaneously on his last western tour on behalf of the League of Nations.)