Carolina Quotes
The great voice of America does not come from the seats of learning, but in a murmur from the hills and the woods and the farms and the factories and the mills, rolling on and gaining volume until it comes to us the voice from the homes of the common men. Do these murmurs come into the corridors of the university? I have not heard them.

Woodrow Wilson Connected to the Carolinas

Source

Address to Princeton University alumni, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (April 17, 1910); reported in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link (1975), vol. 20, p. 365

form
speech
year
1910
locator
p. 365

Cite this record

“The great voice of America does not come from the seats of l…” Woodrow Wilson. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-378BDE96BA. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/378bde96ba

More from Woodrow Wilson

We are living in an extremely interesting time. We have drifted away from purely political questions. We have, fortunately enough, ceased to make constitutional questions the center of discussion and are turning our attention more and more to those things which affect the daily life and fortunes of the rank and file of great nations. We are studying the people whom long ago we ought to have served better than we have served them, and as we get in closer and closer touch with the daily lives of men and women we know how to counsel better, we know how to govern better, we know how to conduct our own individual lives better, with a deeper insight and a truer sympathy. A conference such as this, to discuss social insurance, gives evidence of the dominant interest of our own time, and one of the best elements of social insurance is social understanding — an interchange of views and a comprehension of interests which for a long time was only too rare. It used to be confined to those who were supposed to be restricted to what the general public regarded as the useless precincts of the university. Now, it has spread to the ranks of practical men and has come to be regarded as a practical study.
Excerpts from an address Wilson delivered at a conference on social insurance that was held in 1916. PROCEEDINGS OF THE CONFERENCE ON SOCIAL INSURANCE CALLED BY THE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF INDUSTRIAL ACCIDENT BOARDS AND COMMISSIONS,WASHINGTON, D.C., DECEMBER 5 TO 9, 1916, WASHINGTON GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 1917, P.838
We want the spirit of America to be efficient; we want American character to be efficient; we want American character to display itself in what I may, perhaps, be allowed to call spiritual efficiency—clear, disinterested thinking and fearless action along the right lines of thought. America is not anything if it consists of each of us. It is something only if it consists of all of us; and it can consist of all of us only as our spirits are banded together in a common enterprise.
Speech on Military Preparedness, Pittsburgh (29 January 1916)

All Woodrow Wilson quotations