Dwight D. Eisenhower Quotes

Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.

History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.

Politics ought to be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage.

In most communities it is illegal to cry 'fire' in a crowded assembly. Should it not be considered serious international misconduct to manufacture a general war scare in an effort to achieve local political aims?

Any man who wants to be president is either an egomaniac or crazy.

Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.

If men can develop weapons that are so terrifying as to make the thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide, you would think that man's intelligence and his comprehension... would include also his ability to find a peaceful solution.

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

Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it.

Plans are nothing; planning is everything.

We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.

You don't lead by hitting people over the head - that's assault, not leadership.

The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.

I despise people who go to the gutter on either the right or the left and hurl rocks at those in the center.

This world of ours... must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels - men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.

I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it.

Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.

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

The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

There's no tragedy in life like the death of a child. Things never get back to the way they were.

If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom.

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 are not clothed.