Quotes By Dwight 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.

Now all of us deplore this vast military spending. Yet, in the face of the Soviet attitude, we realize its necessity. Whatever the cost, America will keep itself secure. But in the process we must not, by our own hand, destroy or distort the American system. This we could do by useless overspending. I know one sure way to overspend. That is by overindulging sentimental attachments to outmoded military machines and concepts.

First, separate ground, sea and air warfare is gone forever. This lesson we learned in World War II. I lived that lesson in Europe. Others lived it in the Pacific. Millions of American veterans learned it well.

Now this brings me to my main topic - our military strength - more specifically, how to stay strong against threat from outside, without undermining the economic health that supports our security.

If ever again we should be involved in war, we will fight it in all elements, with all services, as one single concentrated effort.

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.

We know something of the cost of that war. We were in it from December seventh, '41, till August of '45. Ever since that time, we have been waging peace. It has had its ups and downs just as the war did.

Arms alone can give the world no permanent peace, no confident security. Arms are solely for defense - to protect from violent assault what we already have. They are only a costly insurance. They cannot add to human progress.

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.

We do not keep security establishments merely to defend property or territory or rights abroad or at sea. We keep the security forces to defend a way of life.

War is a grim, cruel business, a business justified only as a means of sustaining the forces of good against those of evil.

But I noted with real satisfaction how well ex-footballers seemed to have leadership qualifications... I believe that football, perhaps more than any other sport, tends to instill in men the feeling that victory comes through hard - almost slavish - work, team play, self-confidence, and an enthusiasm that amounts to dedication.

Morale - the will to win, the fighting heart - are the honored hallmarks of the football coach and player. Likewise, they are characteristic of the enterprising executive, the successful troop leader, the established artist and the dedicated teacher and scientist.

Well, a funny thing, there are three that I like all for the same reason, golf, fishing, and shooting, and I do because first, they take you into the fields. There is mild exercise, the kind that an older individual probably should have. And on top of it, it induces you to take at any one time 2 or 3 hours, if you can, where you are thinking of the bird or that ball or the wily trout. Now, to my mind it is a very healthful, beneficial kind of thing, and I do it whenever I get a chance, as you well know.

Probably no one here knows I coached a football team - a service team - playing against Georgetown. I think it was in the fall of 1924 Lou Little was your coach, and he beat us. But it was a very happy circumstance, because it brought me the friendship of another man, Lou Little, who to this day remains my very warm associate and friend.

Not only do I have a great love for the game of golf - no matter how badly I play it - but I have also the belief that through every kind of meeting, through every kind of activity to which we can bring together more often and more intimately peoples of our several countries, by that measure we will do something to solve the difficulties and the tensions that this poor old world seems nowadays to so much endure.

One of the things that I noticed in war was how difficult it was for our soldiers, at first, to realize that there are no rules to war. Our men were raised in sports, where a referee runs a football game, or an umpire a baseball game, and so forth.

My constant prayer, these days, as I start my backswing is, 'Oh, please let me swing slowly.' The trouble is that sometimes I wonder whether I swing at all; whether I am not strictly a chopper."

In other words, our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what it is.

Today I think that prayer is just simply a necessity, because by prayer I believe we mean an effort to get in touch with the Infinite. We know that even our prayers are imperfect. Even our supplications are imperfect. Of course they are. We are imperfect human beings. But if we can back off from those problems and make the effort, then there is something that ties us all together. We have begun in our grasp of that basis of understanding, which is that all free government is firmly founded in a deeply-felt religious faith.