Woodrow Wilson

“ It is only when society is old, long settled to its ways, confident in habit, and without self-que stioning upon any vital point of conduct, that study can affect seclusion and despise the passing interests of the day. America has never yet had a season of leisured quiet in which students could seek a life apart without sharp rigours of conscience, or college instructors easily forget that they were training citizens as well as drilling pupils; and Princeton is not likely to forget that sharp schooling of her youth, when she first learned the lesson of public service. ”

“ There is the spirit of a race in Greek literature, the spirit of quite ano ther people in the books of Virgil and Horace and Tacitus, but in all a mirror of the world, the old passion of the soul, the old hope that keeps so new, the informing memory, the persistent forecast.
It has always seemed to me an odd thing, and a thing against nature, that the literary man, the man whose citizenship and freedom are of the world of thought, should ever have been deemed an unsafe man in affairs ”

“ The growth that is a manifestation of life is equable, draws its springs gently out of the old fountains of strength, builds upon old tissue, covets the old airs that have blown upon it time out of m ind in the past. Colleges ought surely to be the best nurseries of such life, the best schools of the progress which conserves. Unschooled men have only their habits to remind them of the past, only their desires and their instinctive judgments of what is right to guide them into the future: the College should serve the state as its organ of recollection, its seat of vital memory. ”

“ No one who looks into the life of the Institution shall find it easy to say what gave it its spirit and kept it in its character the generations through; but some things lie obvious to the view in Princeton's case. She has always been a school of religion and no one of her sons, who has really lived her life, has escaped that steadying touch which has made her a school of duty. Religion, conceive it but liberally enough, is the true salt wherewith to keep both duty and learning sweet against the taint of time and change ”

“ We cannot pretend to have formed the world, and we are not destined to reform it. We cannot even mend it and set it forward by the reasonable measure of a single generation's work if we forget the old processes or lose our mastery over them. We should have scant capital to trade on were we to throw away the wisdom we have inherited and seek our fortunes with the slender stock we have ourselves accumulated.
This, it seems to me, is the real, the prevalent argument for holding every man we can to the intimate study of the ancient classics. ”

“ The men who founded Princeton were pastors, not ecclesiastics. Their ideal was the service of congregations and communities, not the service o f a church. Duty with them was a practical thing, concerned with righteousness in this world, as well as with salvation in the next. There is nothing that gives such pith to public service as religion. A God of truth is no mean prompter to the enlight ened service of mankind; and character formed, as if in his eye, has always a fibre and sanction such as you shall not easily obtain for the ordinary man from the mild promptings of philosophy. ”

“ I do not mean the air of party politics but the air of the world's transactions, the consciousness of the solidarity of the race, the sense of the duty of man towards man, of the presence of men in every proble m, of the significance of truth for guidance as well as for knowledge, of the potency of ideas, of the promise and the hope that shine in the face of all knowledge. There is laid upon us the compulsion of the national life. We dare not keep aloof and clos et ourselves while a nation comes to its maturity. ”

“ A cultured mind is a mind quit of its awkwardness, eased of all impediment and illusion, made quick and athletic in the acceptable exercise of power. It is a mind at once informed and just, -a mind habituated to choose its course with knowledge, and filled with full assurance, like one who knows the world and can live in it without either unreasonable hope or unwarrented fear. It cannot complain, it cannot trifle, it cannot despair. Leave pessimism to the unc ultured, who do not know reasonable hope; leave fantastic hopes to the uncultured, who do not know the reasonableness of failure. ”

“ It is plain that it is the duty of an institution of learning set in the midst of a free population and amidst signs of social change, not merely to implant a sense of duty, but to illuminate duty by every lesson that can be drawn out of the past. ”

“ It is the general air of the world a man gets when he reads the classics, the thinking which depends upon no time but only upon human nature, which seems full of the voices of the human spirit, quick with the power which moves ever upon the face of affairs. ”

“ Science, -our science, -is new. It is a child of the nineteenth century. It has transformed the world and owes little debt of obligation to any past age. It ha s driven mystery out of the Universe; it has made malleable stuff of the hard world, an laid it out in its elements upon the table of every class room. Its own masters have known its limitations: they have stopped short at the confines of the physical Uni verse, have declined to reckon with spirit or with the stuffs of the mind, have eschewed sense and confined themselves to sensation. ”

“ The safest way in all ordinary seasons is to let it speak for itself: resort to its records, listen to its poets and to its masters in the humbler art of prose. Your real and proper object, after all, is not to expound, but to realize it, consort with it, and make your spirit kin with it, so that you may never shake the sense of obligation off. ”

“ The kind air which blows from age to age has disposed of them like vagrant leaves. There was sap in them for a little, but now they are gone, we do not know where. All literature that has lasted has this claim upon us: that it is not dead; but we cannot be quite so sure of any as we a re of the ancient literature that still lives, because none has lived so long. ”

“ It is the scientific spirit of the age that has wrought the change. I stand with my hat off at very mention of the great men who have made our age an age of knowledge. No man more heartily admires, more gladly welcomes, more approvingly reckons the ga in and the enlightenment that have come to the world through the extraordinary advances in physical science which this great age has witnessed. ”

“ I have no indictment against what science has done: I have only a warning to utter against the atmosphere which has stolen from laboratories into lecture rooms and into the general air of the world at large. ”

“ The object of education is not merely to draw out the powers of the individual mind: it is rather its right object to dr aw all minds to a proper adjustment to the physical and social world in which they are to have their life and their development: to enlighten, strengthen and make fit. ”

“ We can easily hold the service of mankind at arms length while we read and make scholars of ourselves, but we shall be very uneasy, the while, if the right mandates of religion are let in upon us and made part of our thought. ”

“ But her rolls read since the old days, if you know but a little of the quiet life of scattered neighborhoods, like a roster of tru stees, a list of the silent men who carry the honorable burdens of business and of social obligation, -of such names as keep credit and confidence in heart. They suggest a soil full of the old seed and ready, should the air of the time move shrewdly upon it as in the old days, to spring once more into the old harvest. ”

“ It has won for us a great liberty in the physical world, a liberty from superstitious fear and from disease, a freedom to use nature as a familiar servant; but it has not freed us from ourselves. It has not pu rged us of passion or disposed us to virtue. It has not made us less covetous or less ambitious or less self-indulgent. On the contrary, it may be suspected of having enhanced our passions by making wealth so quick to come, and so fickle to stay. ”

“ We cannot see other nations in detail, and looked at in the large, they do not seem like ourselves. Our problems, we say, are our own, and we will take our own way of solving them. Nothing seems au dacious among us, for our case seems to us to stand singular and without parallel. We run in a free field, without recollection of failure, without heed of example.
This danger is nearer to us now than it was in days of armed revolution. The men whom Madison led in the making of the Constitution were men who regarded the past. ”

“ We look in our study of the classics now-a-days more at the phenomena of language than at the movement of spirit; we suppose the world which is invisible to be unreal we doubt the efficacy of feeling and e xaggerate the efficacy of knowledge; we speak of society as an organism, and believe that we can contrive for it a new environment which will change the very nature of its constituent parts; worst of all, we believe in the present and in the future more t han in the past, and deem the newest theory of society the likeliest. ”

“ The art of thinking is as old, and it is the University's function to impart it in all its length: the stiff and difficult stuffs of fact and experience, of prejudice and affection, in which the hard art is to work i ts will, and the long and tedious combinations of cause and effect out of which it is to build up its results. How else will you avoid a ceaseless round of error? The world's memory must be kept alive, or we shall never see an end of its old mistakes. We are in danger to lose our identity and become infantile in every generation. ”

“ The child's crude drawing shares the primitive youth of the first hieroglyphics; but a little reading, a few lessons from some modern master, a little time in the old world's galleries set the lad forward a thousand years and more, make his drawing as old as art itself. ”

“ There is nothing so conservative of life as growth: when that stops, decay sets in and the end comes on apace. Progress is life, for the body politic as for the body natural. To stand still is to court death.
Here, then, if you will but look, you have the law of conservatism disclosed: it is a law of progress. But not all change is progress, not all growth is the manifestation of life. Let one part of the body be in haste to outgrow the re st and you have malignant disease, the threat of death. ”

“ We have broken with the past and have come into a new world.
Do you wonder, then, that I ask for the old drill, the old memory of times gone by, the old schooling in precedent and tradition, the old keeping of faith with the past, as a preparation for leadership in the days of social change ? We have not given science too big a place in our education; but we have made a perilous mistake in giving it too great a preponderance in method in every other branch of study. We must make the humanities human again; must recall what manner of men we a re ”

“ He is not a true man of the world who knows only the present fashoin [fashion] of it. ”

“ The world has long thought that it detected in the academic life some lack of sympathy with itself, some disdain of the homely tasks which make the gross globe inhabitable, -not a little proud aloofness and lofty superiority, as if ed ucation always softened the hands and alienated the heart. ”

“ Our life grows tense and difficult; our resource for the future lies in careful thought, providence, and a wise economy; and the school must be of the nation. I have h ad sight of the perfect place of learning in my thought: a free place, and a various, where no man could be and not know with how great a destiny knowledge had come into the world: -itself a little world; but not perplexed, living with a singleness of aim not known without: the home of sagacious men, hard-headed and with a will to know, debaters of the world's questions every day and used to the rough ways of democracy ”

“ Nine Princeton men sat in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and, though but six of them were Witherspoon's pupils, there was no other college that had there so many as six, and the redoubtable Doctor might have claimed all nine as his in spirit and capacity. Madison guided the convention through the critical stages of its anxious work, with a tact, a gentle quietness, an art of leading without insisting, ruling without commanding,an authority, not of tone or emphasis, but of apt suggesti on, -such as Dr. Witherspoon could never have exercised. ”

“ Bu t I am a student of society and should deem myself unworthy of the comradeship of great men of science should I not speak the plain truth with regard to what I see happening under my own eyes I have no laboratory but the world of books and men in which I live; but I am much mistaken if the scientific spirit of the age is not doing us a great disservice, working in us a certain great degeneracy. Science has bred in us a spirit of experiment and a contempt for the past. ”

“ Of course, when all is said, it is not learning but the spirit of service that will give a college place in the public annals of the nation. It is indispensable, it seems to me, if it is to do its right service, that the air of affair s should be admitted to all its class rooms. ”

“ What you cannot find a substitute for is the classics as literature; and there c an be no first-hand contact with that literature if you will not master the grammar and the syntax which convey its subtle power. Your enlightenment depends on the company you keep. You do not know the world until you know the men who have possessed it an d tried its ways before ever you were given your brief run upon it. And there is no sanity comparable with that which is schooled in the thoughts that will keep. It is such a schooling that we get from the world's literature. ”