Dwight D. Eisenhower citations

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

“Extremes to the right and to the left of any political dispute are always wrong.”

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

“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.”

“The search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions.”

“You do not lead by hitting people over the head -- that's assault, not leadership.”

“Never let yourself be persuaded that any one Great Man, any one leader, is necessary to the salvation of America. When America consists of one leader and 158 million followers, it will no longer be America.”

“Never question another man's motive. His wisdom, yes, but not his motives.”

“A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.”

“Get it all on record now – get the films – get the witnesses – because somewhere down the track of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.”

“May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.”

“Never send a battalion to take a hill if a regiment is available.”

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

“Pessimism never won any battle.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“The history of free men is never really written by chance - but by choice. Their choice.”

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

“The world could be fixed of its problems if every child understood the necessity of their existence.”

“Only Americans can hurt America.”

“Neither a wise man or a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.”

“Freedom has its life in the hearts, the actions, the spirit of men and so it must be daily earned and refreshed - else like a flower cut from its life-giving roots, it will wither and die.”

“I'm going to command the whole shebang.”

“We –finally—look upon change, the every-unfolding future, with confidence rather than doubt, hope rather than fear. We, as a people, were born of revolution. And we have lived by change—always a frontier people, exploring—if not new wilderness—then new science and new knowledge.”

“As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.”

“It was generally conceded that had an election been held, Ho Chi Minh would have been elected Premier.”

“A nation's hope of lasting peace cannot be firmly based upon any race in armaments but rather upon just relations and honest understanding with all other nations.”