You don't lead by hitting people over the head - that's assault, not leadership.
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.
Peace and justice are two sides of the same coin.
Ankles are nearly always neat and good-looking, but knees are nearly always not.
Some years ago I became president of Columbia University and learned within 24 hours to be ready to speak at the drop of a hat, and I learned something more, the trustees were expected to be ready to speak at the passing of the hat.
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.
The purpose is clear. It is safety with solvency. The country is entitled to both.
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?
I shall make that trip. I shall go to Korea.
No one should ever sit in this office over 70 years old, and that I know.
Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.
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.
What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight - it's the size of the fight in the dog.
There is nothing wrong with America that faith, love of freedom, intelligence, and energy of her citizens cannot cure.
A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.
The people of the world genuinely want peace. Some day the leaders of the world are going to have to give in and give it to them.
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.
Don't think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.
There is no victory at bargain basement prices.
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.
Our pleasures were simple - they included survival.
There is no person in this room whose basic rights are not involved in any successful defiance to the carrying out of court orders.
The sergeant is the Army.
The most terrible job in warfare is to be a second lieutenant leading a platoon when you are on the battlefield.
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.
I despise people who go to the gutter on either the right or the left and hurl rocks at those in the center.
Unlike presidential administrations, problems rarely have terminal dates.
I have one yardstick by which I test every major problem - and that yardstick is: Is it good for America?
Any man who wants to be president is either an egomaniac or crazy.
Oh, that lovely title, ex-president.
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.
Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.
I thought it completely absurd to mention my name in the same breath as the presidency.
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.
Don't join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.
The world moves, and ideas that were once good are not always good.
Well, when you come down to it, I don't see that a reporter could do much to a president, do you?
I have found out in later years that we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn't know it then.
I deplore the need or the use of troops anywhere to get American citizens to obey the orders of constituted courts.
It is far more important to be able to hit the target than it is to haggle over who makes a weapon or who pulls a trigger.
When you put on a uniform, there are certain inhibitions that you accept.
I feel impelled to speak today in a language that in a sense is new-one which I, who have spent so much of my life in the military profession, would have preferred never to use. That new language is the language of atomic warfare.
We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.
This desk of mine is one at which a man may die, but from which he cannot resign.
From behind the Iron Curtain, there are signs that tyranny is in trouble and reminders that its structure is as brittle as its surface is hard.
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.
Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it.
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.
Our real problem, then, is not our strength today; it is rather the vital necessity of action today to ensure our strength tomorrow.
Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.
