Read the purposes of men like Patrick Henry and Abraham Lincoln, men untutored of the schools--read their words of leadership, and say whether there be anything wiser than their home-made wisdom.
Woodrow Wilson
The Public Record
Woodrow Wilson was the 28th President of the United States, serving from 1913 to 1921. A member of the Democratic Party, he was born in Virginia and raised in Georgia before moving to New Jersey, where he became a prominent political figure. Wilson was a key leader of the Progressive Movement, advocating for reforms such as antitrust legislation and the establishment of the Federal Reserve System. His presidency is also noted for significant events such as the United States' involvement in World War I and his efforts to promote the League of Nations, an international organization aimed at preventing future conflicts.
gutenberg.org
The inevitable friction of practical politics generates heat enough already, and the office of the thinker and critic should be to supply not heat, but light.
The success of great popular preachers contains a lesson for students of politics who would themselves convert men to a saving doctrine.
The preacher has, indeed, an incalculable advantage over the student of politics in having as his text-book that Bible which speaks of the human heart with a Maker’s knowledge of the thing He has made; by knowing his book he knows the…
But the great preacher reaches the heart of his hearers not by knowledge, but by sympathy--by showing himself a brother-man to his fellow-men.
Government is meant for the good of ordinary people, and it is for ordinary people that the student should elucidate its problems; let him be anxious to keep within earshot of such.
This is not to commend the writer on politics to narrow ‘practical’ views and petty comment; it is not to ask him to find a philosophy of government which will fit the understanding and please the taste of the ‘ward politician:’ it is only…
Thoughts do not fail of acceptance because they are not commonplace enough, but because they are not true enough; and, in the sort of writing about which we are here speaking, truth is a thing which can be detected better by the man who…
You cannot lift truth so high that men cannot reach it; the only caution to be observed is, that you do not ask them to climb where they cannot go without leaving terra firma.
Government is as old as man; men have always been politicians; the men of to-day are only politicians of a particular school; the past furnishes examples of politicians of every other school, and there is as much to be learned about…
If you know what you are looking for and are not expecting to find it advertised in the newspapers, but lying somewhere beneath the surface of things, the dullest fool may often help you to its discovery.
There are whole worlds of fact waiting to be discovered by inference.
Go to France and live next door a prefect in the provinces; go to London and try to find out how things of weight are talked about in the smoking-room of the House of Commons.
Public law is the formal basis of the political life of society, but it is not always an expression of its vital principle.
We are inclined, oftentimes, to take laws and constitutions too seriously, to put implicit faith in their professions without examining their conduct.
We ought to go, in person or in imagination, amongst the people whom they command, and see for ourselves whether those people enjoy liberty.
With reference to laws and constitutions of our own day, we can learn such things best by supplementing books and study by travel and observation.
In other words, statute books and legal commentaries are all very well in the study of politics, if only you quite thoroughly understand that they furnish only the crude body-colors for your picture of the State’s life, upon which all your…
It is high time to recognize the fact that politics can be effectually expounded only by means of the highest literary methods.
Only master workers in language and in the grouping and interpretation of heterogeneous materials can achieve the highest success in making real in words the complex life of States.
John Stuart Mill and Ricardo made a sort of logic of political economy; in order to simplify their processes, they deliberately stripped man of all motives save self-interest alone, and the result was evidently ‘doctrinaire’--was not a…
The new-school economists revolt, and say they want “a more scientific method.” What they really want is a higher literary method.
To make anything of them, the economist must become a literary artist and bring his discoveries home to our imaginations--make these innumerable details of his pour in a concentrated fire upon the central citadels of men’s understandings.
Nothing which elucidates that life ought to be reckoned foreign to its art; and no true picture of that life can ever perish out of literature.
Ripe scholarship in history and jurisprudence is not more indispensable to the student of politics than are a constructive imagination and a poet’s eye for the detail of human incident.
Politicians like Woodrow Wilson
