Dwight David Eisenhower Quotes (23 Quotes)

When I was a small boy growing up in Kansas, a friend of mine and I went fishing and as we sat there in the warmth of a summer afternoon on a riverbank we talked about what we wanted to do when we grew up. I told him that I wanted to be a real major-league baseball player, a genuine professional like Honus Wagner. My friend said that he'd like to be President of the United States. Neither of us got our wish.

They the founders proclaimed to all the world the revolutionary doctrine of the divine rights of the common man. That doctrine has ever since been the heart of the American faith.

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.

The essence of war is fire, famine, and pestilence. They contribute to its outbreak they are among its weapons they become its consequences.

Politics should be the part-time profession of every citizen.

We merely want to live in peace with all the world, to trade with them, to commune with them, to learn from their culture as they may learn from ours, so that the products of our toil may be used for our schools and our roads and our churches and not for guns and planes and tanks and ships of war.

Freedom from fear and injustice and oppression will be ours only in the measure that men who value such freedom are ready to sustain its possession to defend it against every thrust from within or without.

There is a kind of dictatorship that can come about through a creeping paralysis of thought, readiness to accept paternalistic measures by government, and along with those measures comes a surrender of our own responsibilities and therefore a surrender of our own thought over our own lives and our own right to exercise the vote. The free system gives the right to every citizen to do something for himself. Because he has the right, the opportunity is always there.

I never saw a pessimistic general win a battle.

More than ever before, in our country, this is the age of the individual. Endowed with the accumulated knowledge of centuries, armed with all the instruments of modern science, he is still assured personal freedom and wide avenues of expression so that he may win for himself, his family and his country greater material comfort, ease and happiness greater spiritual satisfaction and contentment.

The president cannot escape from his office.

If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They'll have enough to eat, a bed and 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.

The same day I saw my first horror camp, I visited every nook and cranny. I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.

Our economy is the result of millions of decisions we all make every day about producing, earning, saving, investing, and spending.

I despise all adjectives that try to describe people as liberal of conservative, rightist or leftist, as long as they stay in the useful part of the road.

There is one thing about being President, no one can tell you when to sit down.

Men and women, inspired by faith in mans dignity, goaded by conviction in mans responsibility, labored that this land might be a better home for those who followed them. Because every American generation attacked its problems with fresh vigor, we have peopled a continent, subdued its prairies and wilderness, tamed its rivers and devoted its resources to the betterment of those who dwell in it.

What the church should be telling the worker is that the first demand religion makes on him is that he should be a good workman. If he is a carpenter he should be a competent carpenter. Church by all means on Sundays but what is the use of church if at the very center of life a man defrauds his neighbor and insults God by poor craftsmanship.

Unless each day can be looked back upon by an individual as one in which he has had some fun, some joy, some real satisfaction, that day is a loss.

The day before my inauguration President Eisenhower told me, 'You'll find that no easy problems ever come to the President of the United States. If they are easy to solve, somebody else has solved them.'

Americans, indeed all freemen, remember that in the final choice, a soldier's pack is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner's chains.

I make it a practice to avoid hating anyone. If someones been guilty of despicable actions, especially toward me, I try to forget him. I used to follow a practicesomewhat contrived, I admitto write the mans name on a piece of scrap paper, drop it into the lowest drawer of my desk, and say to myself 'That finishes the incident, and so far as Im concerned, that fellow. The drawer became over the years a sort of private wastebasket for crumpled-up spite and discarded personalities. Besides, it seemed to be effective, and helped me avoid harboring useless black feelings.

Through unity of action we can be a veritable colossus in support of peace. No one can defeat us unless we first defeat ourselves. Every one of us must be guided by this truth.