Eisenhower Inspirational Quotes

It is not the size of the dog in the fight that counts, but the fight in the dog that wins.

Never let yourself be persuaded that any one Great Man, any one leader, is necessary to the salvation of America. When America consists of one leader and 158 million followers, it will no longer be America.

What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.

Freedom has its life in the hearts, the actions, the spirit of men and so it must be daily earned and refreshed - else like a flower cut from its life-giving roots, it will wither and die.

I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of the way and let them have it.

Are you born again?" he asked, as we taxied down the runway. He was rather prim and tense, maybe a little like David Eisenhower with a spastic colon. I did not know how to answer for a moment. "Yes," I said. "I am." My friends like to tell each other that I am not really a born-again Christian. They think of me more along the lines of that old Jonathan Miller routine, where he said, "I'm not really a Jew -- I'm Jew-ish." They think I am Christian-ish. But I'm not. I'm just a bad Christian. A bad born-again Christian. And certainly, like the apostle Peter, I am capable of denying it, of presenting myself as a sort of leftist liberation-theology enthusiast and maybe sort of a vaguely Jesusy bon vivant. But it's not true. And I believe that when you get on a plane, if you start lying you are totally doomed. So I told the truth; that I am a believer, a convert. I'm probably about three months away from slapping an aluminum Jesus-fish on the back of my car, although I first want to see if the application or stickum in any way interferes with my lease agreement. And believe me, all this boggles even *my* mind. But it's true. I could go to a gathering of foot-wash Baptists and, except for my dreadlocks, fit right in. I would wash their feet; I would let them wash mine.

Winning isn't everything," Eisenhower said faintly. "Sometimes, just knowing your family's safe and healthy and alive is even better.

There are guys bleeding to death who don't know it, they're smiling, they're talking, they don't feel pain because they're in shock, they ask you for some water and then they're dead. On D-day I ran past a guy lying on his spilled guts with his eyes closed and his thumb in his mouth. Eisenhower's speech had been read to us over the loudspeaker by our commander when we crossed the channel that morning. What valor and inspiration were in his words- all about how we were embarked on a great crusade, that the hopes and prayers of a liberty loving people were going with us....I got gooseflesh when he asked for the blessing of almighty god on this great and noble undertaking. But how to reconcile that with spilled guts on a beach and flies in the eyes of some dead nineteen year old kid who traded his life for some words on paper?

Increasingly alarmed by the development of what President Eisenhower would someday call the “military-industrial complex,” Oppenheimer had tried to use his celebrity status to question the scientific community’s increasing dependency on the military. In 1954, he lost.

According to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, when he was informed of the existence of the bomb at the Potsdam Conference in July, he told Stimson he thought an atomic bombing was unnecessary because “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.

Eisenhower was determined to avoid a direct confrontation with the Soviets. It is unlikely he would have sent American armed forces unilaterally. Yet something could have been done through international organizations, especially if nonaligned nations like India could have been brought on board. In the event, nothing was done. The message to other “captive peoples” was clear: if you rebel, the United States will not help you, and the Soviets will crush you with overwhelming force. There was discontent in other satellite states at the time. If things had gone better in Hungary, more rebellions might have been inspired. The whole history of Europe and the Cold War might have developed differently.

Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote to his son in 1943, "The one quality that can be developed by studious reflection and practice is the leadership of men .... The idea is to get people working together... because they instinctively want to do it for you.... Essentially, you must be devoted to duty, sincere, fair and cheerful." Devotion to duty. Sincerity. Fairness. Good cheer. These are not qualities taught in school. Formal education can make someone a good manager, but it cannot make a leader, because leadership is more about the heart than the head. How does any organization teach courage, integrity, a love of people, a sense of humor, the ability to dream of a better future? How can any training program inculcate personal character and honor? Core to leadership is the ability to relate to people -- to empathize, understand, inspire and motivate.

Must, never, must avoid, must guard: the minatory commands came the eleven times (from the departing Eisenhower). In contrast, Kennedy's rhetoric on January 20 with a cascade of permissions: the word "let" rang out 14 times.

In my experience with Blackie - and earlier with allegedly incompetent recruits at Camp Colt - is rooted my enduring conviction that far too often we write off a backward child as hopeless, a clumsy animal as worthless, a worn-out field as beyond restoration. This we do largely out of our own lack of willingness to take the time and spend the effort to prove ourselves wrong: to prove that a difficult boy can become a fine man, that an animal can respond to training, that the field can regain its fertility.

Discipline carried over into Eisenhower’s approach to the economy and defense. A champion of the free market, Ike told Americans that prosperity would come only to those who worked hard and made sacrifices; the government would do no more than clear a path so that individual Americans could demonstrate their God-given talents. It is no accident that Eisenhower’s closest friends were self-made millionaires who, like him, had started out in life with little. He also told Americans they needed discipline to wage and win the cold war. From his first inaugural to his Farewell Address, he insisted that to prevail in the struggle against global communism, Americans needed to demonstrate vigilance and steadfast purpose. They needed to pay taxes, serve in the military, and rally to the defense of their country. They needed to spend wisely on defense so as not to jeopardize the health of the economy or trigger inflation. Most significant, he believed, the American system could endure only if citizens willingly imposed self-discipline and prepared themselves to bear the common burden of defending free government. Americans like to think of themselves as the inheritors of Athenian democracy, but Eisenhower, a soldier-statesman who believed his nation faced a dire threat from a hostile ideology, also drew inspiration from the martial virtues of Sparta.16

quote inspired Stephen Covey in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to create the Eisenhower Decision Matrix, a two-by-two grid (matrix) that helps you prioritize important activities across both your personal and your professional life by categorizing them according to their urgency and importance.

But for all of Kennedy’s soaring rhetoric, for all the talent he gathered around him, the first months of his administration went badly: the president failed to call off a CIA-inspired invasion of Cuba that ended in disaster; he was unable to keep Khrushchev from building the Berlin Wall; and he was harshly criticized when, rather than commit U.S. forces to fight communist guerrillas in the jungles of Laos, as ex-President Eisenhower had urged him to do, he had instead agreed to enter negotiations aimed at “neutralizing” that kingdom. “There are just so many concessions that we can make in one year and survive politically,” he told a friend in the spring of 1961. “We just can’t have another defeat this year in Vietnam.