Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969)

Quotes

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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 isn't spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of their 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.

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

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

• 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.

• 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.

• When you appeal to force, there's one thing you must never do - lose.

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

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