Quotes By Dwight Eisenhower

Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.

There is one thing about being President - nobody can tell you when to sit down.

We must, even in our honest political fervor, fear neither partisan criticism nor self-criticism. For the pretense of perfection is not one of the marks of good public servants.

A people or a party that is young and sober and confident and free has no need of censors to purify its thought or stiffen its will.

For the kind of America in which we believe is too strong ever to acknowledge fear and too wise ever to fear knowledge. This is the kind of America - and the kind of Republican Party - in which I believe.

We are many things. We are liberal - for we do believe that, in judging his own daily welfare, each citizen, however humble, has greater wisdom than any government, however great.

We are progressive - for we are less impressed with the difficulties we observed yesterday than the opportunities we envision tomorrow.

We are conservative - for we can conceive of no higher commission that history could have conferred upon us than that which we humbly bear - the preservation, in this time of tempest and of peril, of the spiritual values that alone give dignity and meaning to man's pilgrimage on this earth.

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.

The general limits of your freedom are merely these: that you do not trespass upon the equal rights of others.

You have got to have something in which to believe. You have got to have leaders, organization, friendships, and contacts that help you to believe that, and help you to put out your best.

Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionaries and rebels - men and women who dared to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.

All of us have heard this term "preventive war" since the earliest days of Hitler. I recall that is about the first time I heard it.

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. I don't believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing.

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. War settles nothing.

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.

I believe that a political party, to be a useful agency in this country for the promotion of the happiness of our people, must be a progressive, dynamic force; it must have a doctrine, a program, legislative and otherwise, that is; moderate in its approach, avoiding extremes of right and left.

I just don't believe that Americans, 163 [million] intelligent Americans, are going to be satisfied either with the action or with such a distinct trend toward centralization and paternalism in our Government that it becomes difficult to detect it from a socialistic form.

I am not talking about conventions, I am not thinking of such things. I am thinking merely of where does a great party like the Republican Party, what direction does it have to take, if it is going to be a useful agency for America.