In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
This world of ours... must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
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.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
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.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight - it's the size of the fight in the dog.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
You don't lead by hitting people over the head - that's assault, not leadership.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Pull the string, and it will follow wherever you wish. Push it, and it will go nowhere at all.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Politics ought to be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
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.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
There's no tragedy in life like the death of a child. Things never get back to the way they were.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
The clearest way to show what the rule of law means to us in everyday life is to recall what has happened when there is no rule of law.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Some people wanted champagne and caviar when they should have had beer and hot dogs.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
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.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
I despise people who go to the gutter on either the right or the left and hurl rocks at those in the center.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
The older I get the more wisdom I find in the ancient rule of taking first things first. A process which often reduces the most complex human problem to a manageable proportion.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
When you are in any contest, you should work as if there were - to the very last minute - a chance to lose it. This is battle, this is politics, this is anything.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
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.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
If the United Nations once admits that international disputes can be settled by using force, then we will have destroyed the foundation of the organization and our best hope of establishing a world order.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice; their choice!
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Don't join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
I would rather try to persuade a man to go along, because once I have persuaded him, he will stick. If I scare him, he will stay just as long as he is scared, and then he is gone.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Dwight D. Eisenhower