Dwight D. Eisenhower on Veterans Day
1890–1969 United States
← All quotes by Dwight D. Eisenhower
12 quotes
War is mankind's most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men.
The only way to win the next world war is to prevent it.
I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity.
A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility today.
All free men remember that in the final choice a soldier's pack is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner's chains.
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.
Contemplating the cost of modern war, Ike exclaimed one day: "You might as well go out and shoot everyone you see then shoot yourself."
Jim Newton (2011)
You just can't have this kind of war. There aren't enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.
...cooperative effort among nations, can be fortified, not by weapons of war but by wheat and by cotton, by milk and by wool, by meat and timber and rice.
I say when you get into a war, you should win as quick as you can, because your losses become a function of the duration of the war. I believe when you get in a war, get everything you need and win it.
Patriotism means equipped forces and a prepared citizenry. Moral stamina means more energy and more productivity, on the farm and in the factory. Love of liberty means the guarding of every resource that makes freedom possible—from the sanctity of our families and the wealth of our soil to the genius of our scientists.
Some day there is going to be a man sitting in my present chair who has not been raised in the military services and who will have little understanding of where slashes in their estimates can be made with little or no damage. If that should happen while we still have the state of tension that now exists in the world, I shudder to think of what could happen in this country.