Dwight D. Eisenhower - War Quotes

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Possibly my hatred of war blinds me so that I cannot comprehend the arguments they adduce. But, in my opinion, there is no such thing as a preventive war. Although this suggestion is repeatedly made, none has yet explained how war prevents war. Worse than this, no one has been able to explain away the fact that war creates the conditions that beget war.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
During the war, my relations with the press had always been frank and cordial. They were scrupulously careful — when they understood — not to compromise security.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
In the stories that began to circulate about me, I should have seen ample warning that the printed word is not always the whole truth. It didn't occur to me that I would spend part of my life after the war trying to sort out facts from fiction.

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

Dwight D. Eisenhower
The winning of war - the effectiveness in such things - is in the heart, in the determination, in the faith. It is in our beliefs in our country, in our God, everything that goes to make up America.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
But all history has taught us the grim lesson that no nation has ever been successful in avoiding the terrors of war by refusing to defend its rights - by attempting to placate aggression.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
I have spent my life in the study of military strength as a deterrent to war, and in the character of military armaments necessary to win a war. The study of the first of these questions is still profitable, but we are rapidly getting to the point that no war can be won.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
And the next thing is that every war is going to astonish you in the way it occurred, and in the way it is carried out.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
In this way we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country's most powerful resource in peace and war.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
Peace signifies more than the stilling of guns, easing the sorrow of war. More than escape from death, it is a way of life. More than a haven for the weary, it is a hope for the brave.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
In this hope, among the things we teach to the young are such truths as the transcendent value of the individual and the dignity of all people, the futility and stupidity of war, its destructiveness of life and its degradation of human values.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
So - our readiness to meet and defeat this kind of possible attack is forced upon us, both as a potent preventive of actual war and to insure survival in event of attack. This alertness to danger has to be translated into specific policies and activities in the several parts of the world where our rights - our way of life - can be seriously damaged. Work of this kind occupies my days and nights.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
The hope of the world is that wisdom can arrest conflict between brothers. I believe that war is the deadly harvest of arrogant and unreasoning minds. And I find grounds for this belief in the wisdom literature of Proverbs. It says in effect this: Panic strikes like a storm and calamity comes like a whirlwind to those who hate knowledge and ignore their God.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
First, separate ground, sea and air warfare is gone forever. If ever again we should be involved in war, we will fight it in all elements, with all services, as one single concentrated effort.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
War is a contest, and you finally get to a point where you are talking merely about race suicide, and nothing else.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility today. How could you have one if one of its features would be several cities lying in ruins, several cities where many, many thousands of people would be dead and injured and mangled, the transportation systems destroyed, sanitation implements and systems all gone? That isn't preventive war; that is war.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
You just can't have this kind of war. There aren't enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
The peace we seek and need means much more than mere absence of war. It means the acceptance of law, and the fostering of justice, in all the world.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
I know something about that war, and I never want to see that history repeated. But, my fellow Americans, it certainly can be repeated if the peace-loving democratic nations again fearfully practice a policy of standing idly by while big aggressors use armed force to conquer the small and weak.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
The only answer to a regime that wages total cold war is to wage total peace.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
In most communities it is illegal to cry 'fire' in a crowded assembly. Should it not be considered serious international misconduct to manufacture a general war scare in an effort to achieve local political aims?

Dwight D. Eisenhower
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.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
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.

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
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
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
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.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these holocausts, America is today the strongest, the most influential, and most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
War is mankind's most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men. Though you follow the trade of the warrior, you do so in the spirit of Washington — not of Genghis Khan. For Americans, only threat to our way of life justifies resort to conflict.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
There are all sorts of things to be done in this country.… I see no reason why the sums which are now going into these sterile, negative mechanisms that we call war munitions shouldn't go into something positive.

Dwight D. Eisenhower