Nobel Peace Prize Laureates

"A few weeks after Mr. Wilson became President, four of us went to see him. And the President, of course, was polite and as much of a gentleman as he always was. He told of his own support, when he had been governor of New Jersey, of a state referendum on suffrage, which had failed. He said that he thought this was the way suffrage should come, through state referendums, not through Congress. That’s all we accomplished. We said we were going to try and get it through Congress, that we would like to have his help and needed his support very much. And then we sent him another delegation and another and another and another and another and another and another—every type of women’s group we could get. We did this until 1917, when the war started and the President said he couldn’t see any more delegations. (So you began picketing the White House?) We said we would have a perpetual delegation right in front of the White House, so he wouldn’t forget. (this perpetual delegation, or picketing, continued until the President changed his position?) Yes. Since the President had made it clear that he wouldn’t see any more delegations in his office, we felt that pickets outside the White House would be the best way to remind him of our cause. Every day when he went out for his daily ride, as he drove through our picket line he always took off his hat and bowed to us. We respected him very much. I always thought he was a great President. Years later, when I was in Geneva [Switzerland] working with the World Woman’s Party, I was always so moved when I would walk down to the League of Nations and see the little tribute to Woodrow Wilson"

"when President Wilson went to Paris for the peace conference, he was always issuing some wonderful, idealistic statement that was impossible to reconcile with what he was doing at home. And we had an enormous bell—I don’t recall how we ever got such an enormous bell—and every time Wilson would make one of these speeches, we would toll this great bell, and then somebody would go outside with the President’s speech and, with great dignity, burn it in our little caldron."

"President Woodrow Wilson, pacifist, changes his mind under pressure. War is declared."

"I was not alone. The atmosphere, after the joys of the armistice, was strange and foreboding for those of us who sought a world of peace and international comity. Woodrow Wilson had, as Martin Luther King had, a dream, and I shared that dream—all fourteen points of it—and watched it come to nothing. (I was in the press gallery of the House of Representatives when President Woodrow Wilson returned from Europe and addressed Congress. I saw Senator Henry Cabot Lodge avoiding him. I heard Wilson's muted passion, and I cried.) What a splendid vision the League of Nations was; how sickening to watch it scuttled."

"Wilson was a virulent racist who imposed white supremacist policies while serving as president of the United States."

"There were ideas of balance in the governments of his time which Newton felt, and political thought is bound to Newtonian science in the work of Newton himself. Politics, said Woodrow Wilson, is turned into mechanics under the touch of Montesquieu. The principle of unity depended, for each system, upon some single law. The law of gravitation swung the worlds, keeping the free bodies in their places, reined to their courses with order and precision. The poise and balance of forces gave the universe its unity, one of symmetry and perfect adjustment. Wilson says, "The government of the United States was constructed upon the Whig theory of political dynamics, which was a sort of unconscious copy of the Newtonian theory of the universe." And, again, "The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life." Having described one fallacy, Wilson goes on toward another: he would hope that we would substitute the science of Darwin for the science of Newton."

"The Democrat Wilson was a dyed-in-the-wool bigot who as president tried to rid the national government of its few black employees, save, of course, those who could be cooks, waiters, drivers, or fill other kinds of menial jobs. Wilson was, indeed, as great a bigot toward blacks, as today's Democratic president is."

"Wilson's parents were not Virginians. His father was born in Ohio, and his mother was born on the border between England and Scotland. Like many people from the Valley of Virginia, both of his parents sprang from Scottish stock. The older Wilsons learned to love Virginia and taught their son to love it too. In later years a newspaper writer said Wilson was a member of an old Virginia family. Wilson commented, "Of course, this is not true, but I wish I could say it were true." He felt that way because he was a Virginian in habits and thoughts. He said that he could speak out among Virginians because they were men of his "own race and breeding." Nowhere else, he believed, have the American traditions and ideals been kept so unbroken as they have in Virginia."

"Where Coolidge stood on the race issue is clear, but he did not take any concrete steps to ease the burden of discrimination. Nevertheless, the conservative Coolidge has had a far better press on the race issue than the progressive Woodrow Wilson, who was one of the most bigoted persons ever to hold the nation's highest office."

"They will not forget him in the future. He is the first leader in the history of society who has treated the ancient dream of a peaceful world as something more than wishful thinking, the first who was willing to stake all in drawing the nations of the world together in an effort to make that "just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations" for which Abraham Lincoln pleaded. In Paris in 1919 Woodrow Wilson actually persuaded the leaders of the majority of the earth's nations to help him build and set up a machine for such a peace…The world will not forget the man who led in this effort to achieve enduring peace. That is what I was saying in those bitter days and have been saying in all the melancholy ones since."

"Wilson was as much a Utopian as Lenin. He, too, planned to end the Balance of Power in Europe, not to restore it. As well, he was in idealistic competition with the Bolsheviks. He wished to show that America's war-aims were, like theirs, 'anti-imperialistic', and so to persuade them to continue in the war. The Fourteen Points laid down on 8 January 1918 were the outcome. Self-determination was to supersede the historic states of Europe. Belgium, of course, was to recover her independence; Alsace and Lorraine were to return to France, and all Russian territory was to be evacuated. But, as well, Poland was to be restored; the peoples of Austria-Hungary and the Balkans freed. Secret diplomacy was to be ended, and a League of Nations to take the place of the Balance of Power. The defeat of Germany was for Wilson merely a preliminary, whereas to Great Britain and France it was the essential aim. Yet they did not acquiesce in the Fourteen Points solely in order to commit the United States. They, too, had a public opinion which thought of 'a war to end war' and demanded a permanent peace, secured by some other means than the Balance of Power."

"Woodrow Wilson proclaimed that this country entered World War I “to make the world safe for democracy.” This was the very same President who issued executive orders segregating most of the eating and rest-room facilities for federal employees. [...] Obviously, black people were not included in Woodrow Wilson’s defense perimeter. Whatever the life of blacks might have been under German rule, this country clearly did not fight Germany for the improvement of the status of black people—under the saved democracy—in this land."

"HAD WOODROW WILSON been a man to look back upon his eight years in the White House, he might well have regarded his achievements with some complacency. Entering the Presidency with the same mental vigor that he had applied to the problems of Princeton and the state of New Jersey, he had pioneered a path around the pitfalls of plutocracy and mob rule and had effectively led a groping people toward political salvation. He had laid down a basic pattern for solving, without violence, those social and economic problems of the age that grew out of new ways of life. He had honoured the principle that men’s labor was not to be regarded as a commodity, had given impetus to collective bargaining, and had established the supremacy of the public interest above the advantage of any special combination of labor or capital or industrial management. His Federal Reserve policy gave promise of meeting the danger of recurring panic, and his tariff measures had helped to wean the nation from the pap of privilege. His administration had laid a foundation for a “welfare state” by providing for the matching of federal funds with those of the states to equalize certain facilities through the nation; new taxes had been levied to make this possible."

"Some men who are not real men love other things about themselves, but the real man believes that his honor is dearer than his life; and a nation is merely all of us put together, and the nation's honor is dearer than the nation's comfort and the nation's peace and the nation's life itself."

"Armed neutrality, it now appears, is impracticable."

"If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it; what we have to determine now is whether we are big enough, whether we are men enough, whether we are free enough, to take possession again of the government which is our own."

"Industry we have got to humanize, — not through the trusts, — but through the direct action of law guaranteeing protection against dangers and compensation for injuries, guaranteeing sanitary conditions, proper hours, the right to organize, and all the other things which the conscience of the country demands as the workingman's right. We have got to cheer and inspirit our people with the sure prospects of social justice; and due reward, with the vision of the open gates of opportunity for all. We have got to set the energy and the initiative of this great people absolutely free, so that the future of America will be greater than the past, so that the pride of America will grow with achievement, so that America will know as she advances from generation to generation that each brood of her sons is greater and more enlightened than that which preceded it, know that she is fulfilling the promise that she has made to mankind."

"We are at the parting of the ways. We have, not one or two or three, but many, established and formidable monopolies in the United States. We have, not one or two, but many, fields of endeavor into which it is difficult, if not impossible, for the independent man to enter. 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."

"Let me say again that I am not impugning the motives of the men in Wall Street. They may think that that is the best way to create prosperity for the country. When you have got the market in your hand, does honesty oblige you to turn the palm upside down and empty it? If you have got the market in your hand and believe that you understand the interest of the country better than anybody else, is it patriotic to let it go? I can imagine them using this argument to themselves. The dominating danger in this land is not the existence of great individual combinations, — that is dangerous enough in all conscience, — but the combination of the combinations, — of the railways, the manufacturing enterprises, the great mining projects, the great enterprises for the development of the natural water-powers of the country, threaded together in the personnel of a series of boards of directors into a "community of interest" more formidable than any conceivable single combination that dare appear in the open."

"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. This is the greatest question of all, and to this statesmen must address themselves with an earnest determination to serve the long future and the true liberties of men."

"The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it."

"So, our honest politicians and our honorable corporation heads owe it to their reputations to bring their activities out into the open."

"No student knows his subject: the most he knows is where and how to find out the things he does not know."

"All that progressives ask or desire is permission — in an era when "development," "evolution," is the scientific word — to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine."

"Government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton."

"The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy."

"No country can afford to have its prosperity originated by a small controlling class. The treasury of America lies in those ambitions, those energies, that cannot be restricted to a special favored class. It depends upon the inventions of unknown men, upon the originations of unknown men, upon the ambitions of unknown men. Every country is renewed out of the ranks of the unknown, not out of the ranks of those already famous and powerful and in control."

"American industry is not free, as once it was free; American enterprise is not free; the man with only a little capital is finding it harder to get into the field, more and more impossible to compete with the big fellow. Why? Because the laws of this country do not prevent the strong from crushing the weak. That is the reason, and because the strong have crushed the weak the strong dominate the industry and the economic life of this country. No man can deny that the lines of endeavor have more and more narrowed and stiffened; no man who knows anything about the development of industry in this country can have failed to observe that the larger kinds of credit are more and more difficult to obtain, unless you obtain them upon the terms of uniting your efforts with those who already control the industries of the country; and nobody can fail to observe that any man who tries to set himself up in competition with any process of manufacture which has been taken under the control of large combinations of capital will presently find himself either squeezed out or obliged to sell and allow himself to be absorbed."

"Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it. They know that America is not a place of which it can be said, as it used to be, that a man may choose his own calling and pursue it just as far as his abilities enable him to pursue it; because to-day, if he enters certain fields, there are organizations which will use means against him that will prevent his building up a business which they do not want to have built up; organizations that will see to it that the ground is cut from under him and the markets shut against him. For if he begins to sell to certain retail dealers, to any retail dealers, the monopoly will refuse to sell to those dealers, and those dealers, afraid, will not buy the new man's wares."

"In most parts of our country men work, not for themselves, not as partners in the old way in which they used to work, but generally as employees,—in a higher or lower grade,—of great corporations. There was a time when corporations played a very minor part in our business affairs, but now they play the chief part, and most men are the servants of corporations."

"I have not written a book since the campaign. I did not write this book at all. It is the result of the editorial literary skill of Mr. William Bayard Hale, who has put together here in their right sequences the more suggestive portions of my campaign speeches. And yet it is not a book of campaign speeches. It is a discussion of a number of very vital subjects in the free form of extemporaneously spoken words. I have left the sentences in the form in which they were stenographically reported. I have not tried to alter the easy-going and often colloquial phraseology in which they were uttered from the platform, in the hope that they would seem the more fresh and spontaneous because of their very lack of pruning and recasting."

"There are those in this country who threaten direct action to force their will, upon a majority. Russia today, with its blood and terror, is a painful object lesson of the power of minorities. It makes little difference what minority it is; whether capital or labor, or any other class; no sort of privilege will ever be permitted to dominate this country. We are a partnership or nothing that is worth while. We are a democracy, where the majority are the masters, or all the hopes and purposes of the men who founded this government have been defeated and forgotten. In America there is but one way by which great reforms can be accomplished and the relief sought by classes obtained, and that is through the orderly processes of representative government. Those who would propose any other method of reform are enemies of this country. America will not be daunted by threats nor lose her composure or calmness in these distressing times. We can afford, in the midst of this day of passion and unrest, to be self - contained and sure. The instrument of all reform in America is the ballot. The road to economic and social reform in America is the straight road of justice to all classes and conditions of men. Men have but to follow this road to realize the full fruition of their objects and purposes. Let those beware who would take the shorter road of disorder and revolution. The right road is the road of justice and orderly process."

"The seed of revolution is repression."

"Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America, my fellow citizens — I do not say it in disparagement of any other great people—America is the only idealistic Nation in the world. When I speak practical judgments about business affairs, I can only guess whether I am speaking the voice of America or not, but when I speak the ideal purposes of history I know that I am speaking the voice of America, because I have saturated myself since I was a boy in the records of that spirit, and everywhere in them there is this authentic tone of the love of justice and the service of humanity. If by any mysterious influence of error America should not take the leading part in this new enterprise of concerted power, the world would experience one of those reversals of sentiment, one of those penetrating chills of reaction, which would lead to a universal cynicism, for if America goes back upon mankind, mankind has no other place to turn. It is the hope of nations all over the world that America will do this great thing."

"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."

"This war, in its inception was a commercial and industrial war. It was not a political war."

"If every nation is going to be our rival, if every nation is going to dislike and distrust us, and that will be the case, because having trusted us beyond measure the reaction will occur beyond measure (as it stands now they trust us they look to us, they long that we shall undertake anything for their assistance rather than that any other nation should undertake it)— if we say, "No, we are in this world to live by ourselves, and get what we can out of it by any selfish processes," then the reaction will change the whole heart and attitude of the world toward this great, free, justice-loving people, and after you have changed the attitude of the world, what have you produced? Peace? Why, my fellow citizens, is there any man here or any woman, let me say is there any child here, who does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry? The real reason that the war that we have just finished took place was that Germany was afraid her commercial rivals were going to get the better of her, and' the reason why some nations went into the war against Germany was that they thought Germany would get the commercial advantage of them. The seed of the jealousy, the seed of the deep-seated hatred was hot, successful commercial and industrial rivalry."

"America is the place where you can not kill your Government by killing the men who conduct it. The only way you can kill government in America is by making the men and women of America forget how to govern, and nobody can do that. They sometimes find the team a little difficult to drive, but they sooner or later whip it into harness."

"The Germans are really a stupid people. They always do the wrong thing. They always did the wrong thing during the war. They don't understand human nature. This is the most tactless speech I have ever heard. It will set the whole world against them."

"Conservatism is the policy of making no changes and consulting your grandmother when in doubt."

"We are all agreed that there can be no peace obtained by any kind of bargain or compromise with the governments of the Central Empires, because we have dealt with them already and have seen them deal with other governments that were parties to this struggle, at Brest Litovsk and Bucharest. They have convinced us that they are without honour and do not intend justice. They observe no covenants, accept no principle but force and their own interest. We cannot “come to terms” with them. They have made it impossible. The German people must by this time be fully aware that we cannot accept the word of those who forced this war upon us. We do not think the same thoughts or speak the same language of agreement."

"Friendship is the only cement that will ever hold the world together."

"Well, nothing was ever done so systematically as nothing is being done now."

"I have read it with the deepest appreciation of Mr. Herron's singular insight into all the elements of a complicated situation and into my own motives and purposes."

"I can imagine no greater disservice to the country than to establish a system of censorship that would deny to the people of a free republic like our own their indisputable right to criticise their own public officials. While exercising the great powers of the office I hold, I would regret in a crisis like the one through which we are now passing to lose the benefit of patriotic and intelligent criticism."

"The supreme test of the nation has come. We must all speak, act, and serve together!"

"Once lead this people into war and they will forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance."

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

"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."

"The question upon which the whole future peace and policy of the world depends is this: Is the present war a struggle for a just and secure peace, or only for a new balance of power? If it be only a struggle for a new balance of power, who will guarantee, who can guarantee, the stable equilibrium of the new arrangement? Only a tranquil Europe can be a stable Europe. There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace."