Dwight D. Eisenhower Quotes
“Only Americans can hurt America.”
“Peace and justice are two sides of the same coin.”
“We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom.”
Ike’s historic farewell address centered on his warning that we must be
vigilant against the “military industrial complex” to balence security and liberty
“We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence,
whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”
the entire speach in two parts:
“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.
The 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.”
1953, a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors
“We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.”
”If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison.
They will have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads.
But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human
being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government.”
As president of Columbia University, speech to luncheon clubs,
Galveston, Texas, December 8, 1949
“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.”
Speech: New York City, May 31, 1954
“Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do
because they want to do it.”
“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.”
“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.
War settles nothing.”
Press conference: 1953.
“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can,
only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity.
War settles nothing.”
Speech: Ottawa, Canada, January 10, 1946
“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.”
“The world moves, and ideas that were once good are not always good.”
“The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice;
their choice!”
“Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives
acclaim earned in the blood of his followers and the sacrifices of his friends”
“History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.”
“Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do
because they want to do it.”
“How far you can go without destroying from within
what you are trying to defend from without?”
“Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative.”
“Together we must learn how to compose difference, not with arms,
but with intellect and decent purpose…”
“There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs.”
“If men can develop weapons that are so terrifying as to make the
thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide,
you would think that man’s intelligence and his comprehension
would include also his ability to find a peaceful solution.”
“War in our time has become an anachronism.
Whatever the case in the past, war in the future can serve no useful purpose.
A war which became general, as any limited action might,
would only result in the virtual destruction of mankind.”
“The Honor System as a feature of West Point seems to grow in importance
with a graduate as the years secede until finally it becomes something which
he is almost reluctant to talk about.
It occupies a position in his mind akin to the virtue of his mother or his sister.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower, United States Military Academy, Class of 1915;
Letter to Major General Maxwell D. Taylor, then USMA Superintendent.
“A cadet will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do.”
Cadet Honor Code http://www.westpointgradsagainstthewar.org/