Woodrow Wilson War Quotations

To fight, you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fibre of national life...

Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?

This is a war to end all wars.

...men are not put into this world to go the path of ease, they are put into this world to go the path of pain and struggle.

...I do not want a government that will take care of me, I want a government that will make other men take their hands off me so I can take care of myself.

It must be a peace without victory...Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor's terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last.

It has become a people's war, and peoples of all sorts and races, of every degree of power and variety of fortune, are involved inits sweeping processes of change and settlement.

The great war that broke so suddenly upon the world two years ago, and which has swept up within its flame so great a part of thecivilized world, has affected us very profoundly.... With its causes and its objects we are not concerned. The obscure fountains from which its stupendous flood has burst we are not interested to search for or explore.

It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilizationitself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things we have always carried closest to our hearts.

I come from the South and I know what war is, for I have seen its terrible wreckage and ruin. It is easy for me as President to declare war. I do not have to fight, and neither do the gentlemen on the Hill who now clamor for it. It is some poor farmer's boy, or the son of some poor widow - who will have to do the fighting and dying.

It was necessary to put the South at a moral disadvantage by transforming the contest from a war waged against states fighting for their indepdence into a war waged against states fighting for the maintenance and extension of slavery...and the world, it might be hoped, would see it as a moral war, not a political; and the sympathy of nations would begin to run for the North, not for the South.

War isn’t declared in the name of God; it is a human affair entirely.

I am the friend of peace and mean to preserve it for America so long as I am able. . . . No course of my choosing or of their (nations at war) will lead to war. War can come only by the wilful acts and aggressions of others.

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.

Politics is a war of causes; a joust of principles.

I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it.

War is only a sort of dramatic representation, a sort of dramatic symbol of a thousand forms of duty. I fancy that it is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shooting at you.

There is such a thing as 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.

The presidential office is not a rosewater affair. This is an office in which a man must put on his war paint.

It is not an army that we must train for war; it is a nation.

Once lead this people into war, and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight, you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fiber of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street.

Politics is a war of causes; a joust of principles. Government is too serious a matter to admit of meaningless courtesies.

The Government of the United States would be constrained to hold the Imperial German government to a strict accountability for such acts of their naval authorities.