Dwight D. Eisenhower's Quotes

Pessimism never won any battle.

There is no victory at bargain basement prices.

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

The best morale exist when you never hear the word mentioned. When you hear a lot of talk about it, it's usually lousy.

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

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

The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice; their choice!

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

Only our individual faith in freedom can keep us free.

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

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

We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.

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.

If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.

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

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.

Only strength can cooperate. Weakness can only beg.

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

Our forces saved the remnants of the Jewish people of Europe for a new life and a new hope in the reborn land of Israel. Along with all men of good will, I salute the young state and wish it well.

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.

War settles nothing.

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

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.

Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative.

Oh, that lovely title, ex-president.

Our pleasures were simple - they included survival.

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

Unlike presidential administrations, problems rarely have terminal dates.

'Worry' is a word that I don't allow myself to use.

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.

I shall make that trip. I shall go to Korea.

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

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

No one should ever sit in this office over 70 years old, and that I know.

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

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

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

Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.

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

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

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

The older I get the more wisdom I find in the ancient rule of taking first things first. A process which often reduces the most complex human problem to a manageable proportion.

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.

If the United Nations once admits that international disputes can be settled by using force, then we will have destroyed the foundation of the organization and our best hope of establishing a world order.

When you are in any contest, you should work as if there were - to the very last minute - a chance to lose it. This is battle, this is politics, this is anything.

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 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.

Some years ago I became president of Columbia University and learned within 24 hours to be ready to speak at the drop of a hat, and I learned something more, the trustees were expected to be ready to speak at the passing of the hat.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Plans are nothing; planning is everything.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America.

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