Dwight D. Eisenhower Quotes

You have a row of dominoes set up; you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is that it will go over very quickly.

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

Oh, that lovely title, ex-president.

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.

Our pleasures were simple – they included survival.

How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?

This desk of mine is one at which a man may die, but from which he cannot resign.

I have found out in later years that we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn’t know it then.

We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom.

In the final choice a soldier’s pack is not so heavy as a prisoner’s chains.

Unlike presidential administrations, problems rarely have terminal dates.

An atheist is a man who watches a Notre Dame – Southern Methodist University game and doesn’t care who wins.

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.

The most terrible job in warfare is to be a second lieutenant leading a platoon when you are on the battlefield.

Politics is a profession; a serious, complicated and, in its true sense, a noble one.

Don’t think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.

We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.

The United States strongly seeks a lasting agreement for the discontinuance of nuclear weapons tests. We believe that this would be an important step toward reduction of international tensions and would open the way to further agreement on substantial measures of disarmament.

‚Worry‘ is a word that I don’t allow myself to use.

Only Americans can hurt America.

Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.

The purpose is clear. It is safety with solvency. The country is entitled to both.

War settles nothing.

There is no person in this room whose basic rights are not involved in any successful defiance to the carrying out of court orders.

There are a number of things wrong with Washington. One of them is that everyone is too far from home.

Well, when you come down to it, I don’t see that a reporter could do much to a president, do you?

Ankles are nearly always neat and good-looking, but knees are nearly always not.

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.

When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war.

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?

The free world must not prove itself worthy of its own past.

I’m saving that rocker for the day when I feel as old as I really am.

It is far more important to be able to hit the target than it is to haggle over who makes a weapon or who pulls a trigger.

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.

I have only one yardstick by which I test every major problem – and that yardstick is: Is it good for America?

The people of the world genuinely want peace. Some day the leaders of the world are going to have to give in and give it to them.

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

I feel impelled to speak today in a language that in a sense is new-one which I, who have spent so much of my life in the military profession, would have preferred never to use. That new language is the language of atomic warfare.

I have one yardstick by which I test every major problem – and that yardstick is: Is it good for America?

I thought it completely absurd to mention my name in the same breath as the presidency.

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

The world moves, and ideas that were once good are not always good.

I deplore the need or the use of troops anywhere to get American citizens to obey the orders of constituted courts.

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

If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.

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

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

Plans are nothing; planning is everything.

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.

We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it.

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.

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

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.

There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs.

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.

Peace and justice are two sides of the same coin.

Pull the string, and it will follow wherever you wish. Push it, and it will go nowhere at all.

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

What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight – it’s the size of the fight in the dog.

When you put on a uniform, there are certain inhibitions that you accept.