Dwight D. Eisenhower

I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

When you are in any contest you should work as if there were - to the very last minute - a chance to lose it.

Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in the blood of his followers and the sacrifices of his friends.

Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

There is nothing wrong with America that the faith, love of freedom, intelligence and energy of her citizens cannot cure.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired in the final analysis, is a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and not clothed.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
Dwight D. Eisenhower - speech, April 2, 1957
We succeed only as we identify in life, or in war, or in anything else, a single overriding objective, and make all other considerations bend to that one objective.
Dwight D. Eisenhower - From a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1963
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Only strength can cooperate. Weakness can only beg.

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.
Dwight D. Eisenhower - Inaugural Address, January 20, 1953
A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.

I would rather try to persuade a man to go along, because once I have persuaded him he will stick. If I scare him, he will stay just as long as he is scared, and then he is gone.

Before all else, we seek, upon our common labor as a nation, the blessings of Almighty God.

On that day let us solemnly remember the sacrifices of all those who fought so valiantly, on the seas, in the air, and on foreign shores, to preserve our heritage of freedom, and let us reconsecrate ourselves to the task of promoting an enduring peace so that all their efforts shall not have been in vain.

A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
Dwight D. Eisenhower - A speech to the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference in Washington, DC on Nov. 14, 1957
Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.

I never saw a pessimistic general win a battle.

Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and co-operation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.

I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

I can think of nothing more boring for the American people than to have to sit in their living rooms for a whole half hour looking at my face on their television screens.

We merely want to live in peace with all the world, to trade with them, to commune with them, to learn from their culture as they may learn from ours, so that the products of our toil may be used for our schools and our roads and our churches and not for guns and planes and tanks and ships of war.

- Dwight D. Eisenhower