Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969)

Quotes

• One of these days, the people are going to demand peace of the government, and the government is going to have to give it to them.

• 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. 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 clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

• The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice -- their choice.

• 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.

• Things are more like they are today than they have ever been before.

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

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

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

• Don't join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.

• 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.

• Do not needlessly endanger your lives until I give you the signal.

• 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.

• Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.

• From this day forward, the millions of our schoolchildren will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural schoolhouse, the dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty.

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

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