Quotes by Dwight D. Eisenhower

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.

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

Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book...

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 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 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.

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

May we, in our dealings with all the peoples of the earth, ever speak the truth and serve justice.

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

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

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

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.

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.
(From a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1963)

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.
(Inaugural Address, January 20, 1953)

Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.
(September 11, 1956)

Don't think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.
(speech at Dartmouth College, June 14, 1953)

What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight - it's the size of the fight in the dog.
(speech to the Republican National Committee, January 31, 1958)

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.
(speech, April 2, 1957)