Dwight D. Eisenhower Quotes

275 Sourced Quotes

We are so proud of our guarantees of freedom in thought and speech and worship, that, unconsciously, we are guilty of one of the greatest errors that ignorance can make — we assume our standard of values is shared by all other humans in the world.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
When I was a small boy in Kansas, a friend of mine and I went fishing and as we sat there in the warmth of the summer afternoon on a river bank, 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.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
I do have one instruction for you, General. Do something about that damned football team.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
The search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
When you get into a war, you should win as quick as you can, because your losses become a function of the duration of the war.… Get everything you need and win it.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
We have never stopped sin by passing laws; and in the same way, we are not going to take a great moral ideal and achieve it merely by law.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower
We have erased segregation in those areas of national life to which Federal authority clearly extends. So doing in this, my friends, we have neither sought nor claimed partisan credit, and all such actions are nothing more — nothing less than the rendering of justice. And we have always been aware of this great truth: the final battle against intolerance is to be fought — not in the chambers of any legislature — but in the hearts of men.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
Why are we proud? We are proud, first of all, because from the beginning of this Nation, a man can walk upright, no matter who he is, or who she is. He can walk upright and meet his friend—or his enemy; and he does not fear that because that enemy may be in a position of great power that he can be suddenly thrown in jail to rot there without charges and with no recourse to justice. We have the habeas corpus act, and we respect it.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower
Today we are competing for men's hearts, and minds, and trust all over the world. In such a competition, what we are at home and what we do at home is even more important than what we say abroad.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
It is only as we govern ourselves that we are well-governed.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
These proposals spring, without ulterior motive or political passion, from our calm conviction that the hunger for peace is in the hearts of all people — those of Russia and of China no less than of our own country. They conform to our firm faith that God created man to enjoy, not destroy, the fruits of the earth and of their own toil.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
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.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
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.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
A foundation of our American way of life is our national respect for law.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
The right of no nation depends upon the date of its birth or the size of its power. As there can be no second class citizens before the law of America, so—we believe—there can be no second-class nations before the law of the world community.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
I just won't get into a pissing contest with that skunk.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
Our forms of government - though both cast in the democratic pattern - are greatly different. Indeed, sometimes it appears that many of our misunderstandings spring from an imperfect knowledge on the part of both of us of the dissimilarities in our forms of government.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
So it is that the laws most binding us as a people are laws of the spirit—proclaimed in church and synagogue and mosque. These are the laws that truly declare the eternal equality of all men, of all races, before the man-made laws of our land. And we are profoundly aware that—in the world—we can claim the trust of hundreds of millions of people, across Africa and Asia—only as we ourselves hold high the banner of justice for all.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower
The hand of the aggressor is stayed by strength — and strength alone.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
More than any single action by the government since the end of the war, this one would change the face of America with straightaways, cloverleaf turns, bridges, and elongated parkways. Its impact on the American economy-the jobs it would produce in manufacturing and construction, the rural areas it would open up-was beyond calculation.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
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.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
Change is the law of life and of relations between nations. When two great peoples such as ours, energetic and optimistic, live side by side in all the diversity that freedom offers, change is rapid and brings in its wake problems, sometimes frictions.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
We have heard much of the phrase, peace and friendship. This phrase, in expressing the aspiration of America, is not complete. We should say instead, peace and friendship, in freedom. This, I think, is America's real message to the rest of the world.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
This is a long tough road we have to travel. The men that can do things are going to be sought out just as surely as the sun rises in the morning. Fake reputations, habits of glib and clever speech, and glittering surface performance are going to be discovered.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
One circumstance that helped our character development: we were needed. I often think today of what an impact could be made if children believed they were contributing to a family's essential survival and happiness. In the transformation from a rural to an urban society, children are — though they might not agree — robbed of the opportunity to do genuinely responsible work.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
We are—proudly—a people with no sense of class or caste. We judge no man by his name or inheritance, but by what he does—and for what he stands.

Dwight D. Eisenhower