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The trouble with the theory [of limited and divided government] is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. This is where the living and breathing constitution comes from. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life.

Woodrow Wilson

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Woodrow Wilson
Age: 67 †
Born: 1856
Born: December 28
Died: 1924
Died: February 23
28Th U.S. President
Academic
Jurist
Lawyer
Political Scientist
Politician
Statesperson
Teacher
University Teacher
The Manse
Thomas Woodrow Wilson
T. Woodrow Wilson
Thomas W. Wilson
President Wilson
T. W. Wilson
T. Wilson
Living
Tasks
Modified
Comes
Machines
Functions
Government
Function
Shaped
Thing
Pressure
Sheer
Life
Constitution
Divided
Theory
Limited
Environment
Machine
Trouble
Breathing
Necessitated

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The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.
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A man may be defeated by his own secondary successes.
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All things come to him who waits
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It is like writing history with lightning and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.
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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.
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The way to stop financial joyriding is to arrest the chauffeur, not the automobile.
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I believe in human liberty as I believe in the wine of life. There is no salvation for men in the pitiful condescension of industrial masters. Guardians have no place in a land of freemen.
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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.
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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.
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No nation is fit to sit in judgement upon any other nation.
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The spirit of [William] Penn will not be stayed. You cannot set limits to such knightly adventurers. After their own day is gone their spirits stalk the world, carrying inspiration everywhere that they go and reminding men of the lineage, the fine lineage, of those who have sought justice and right.
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The success of a party means little except when the nation is using that party for a large and definite purpose. No one can mistake the purpose for which the nation now seeks to use the Democratic party. It seeks to use it to interpret a change in its own plans and point of view.
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The world is not looking for servants, there are plenty of these, but for masters, men who form their purposes and then carry them out, let the consequences be what they may.
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Business underlies everything in our national life, including our spiritual life. Witness the fact that in the Lord's Prayer, the first petition is for daily bread. No one can worship God or love his neighbor on an empty stomach.
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A presidential campaign may easily degenerate into a mere personal contest, and so lose its real dignity. There is no indispensable man.
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What is at the heart of all national problems? It is that we have seen the hand of material interest sometimes about to close upon our dearest rights and possessions.
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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.
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Scholarship cannot do without literature.... It needs literature to float it, to set it current, to authenticate it to all the race, to get it out of closets and into the brains of men who stir abroad.
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The man who disparages music as a luxury and non-essential is doing the nation an injury. Music now, more than ever before, is a national need.
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If you wish your children to be Christians you must really take the trouble to be Christian yourselves. Those are the only terms upon which the home will work the gracious miracle.
Woodrow Wilson