Woodrow Wilson on Independence Day
1856–1924 United States
← All quotes by Woodrow Wilson
9 quotes
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.
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.
Freedom exists only where the people take care of the government.
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 the increase of it.
Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end, and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.
2. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war.
The Fourteen Points Speech (1918)
Liberty is its own reward.
Our object now, as then, is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power, and to set up among the really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth insure the observance of those principles.
The lines of red are lines of blood, nobly and unselfishly shed by men who loved the liberty of their fellowmen more than they loved their own lives and fortunes. God forbid that we should have to use the blood of America to freshen the color of the flag. But if it should ever be necessary, that flag will be colored once more, and in being colored will be glorified and purified.