MondayMar 09, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.
When I was a small boy growing up in Kansas, a friend of mine and I went fishing and as we sat there in the warmth of a summer afternoon on a riverbank we talked about what we wanted to do when we grew up. I told him that I wanted to be a real major-league baseball player, a genuine professional like Honus Wagner. My friend said that he'd like to be President of the United States. Neither of us got our wish.
We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it.
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.
They [the founders] proclaimed to all the world the revolutionary doctrine of the divine rights of the common man. That doctrine has ever since been the heart of the American faith.
The essence of war is fire, famine, and pestilence. They contribute to its outbreak; they are among its weapons; they become its consequences.
The day before my inauguration President Eisenhower told me, 'You'll find that no easy problems ever come to the President of the United States. If they are easy to solve, somebody else has solved them.'
I never saw a pessimistic general win a battle.
Don't join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go into your library and read every book.
There is a kind of dictatorship that can come about through a creeping paralysis of thought, readiness to accept paternalistic measures by government, and along with those measures comes a surrender of our own responsibilities and therefore a surrender of our own thought over our own lives and our own right to exercise the vote. The free system gives the right to every citizen to do something for himself. Because he has the right, the opportunity is always there.
I have found out in later years we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn't know it then.
The president cannot escape from his office.
Our economy is the result of millions of decisions we all make every day about producing, earning, saving, investing, and spending.
Men and women, inspired by faith in mans dignity, goaded by conviction in mans responsibility, labored that this land might be a better home for those who followed them. Because every American generation attacked its problems with fresh vigor, we have peopled a continent, subdued its prairies and wilderness, tamed its rivers and devoted its resources to the betterment of those who dwell in it.
Only our individual faith in freedom can keep us free.
I make it a practice to avoid hating anyone. If someones been guilty of despicable actions, especially toward me, I try to forget him. I used to follow a practicesomewhat contrived, I admitto write the mans name on a piece of scrap paper, drop it into the lowest drawer of my desk, and say to myself: 'That finishes the incident, and so far as Im concerned, that fellow. The drawer became over the years a sort of private wastebasket for crumpled-up spite and discarded personalities. Besides, it seemed to be effective, and helped me avoid harboring useless black feelings.
Freedom from fear and injustice and oppression will be ours only in the measure that men who value such freedom are ready to sustain its possession to defend it against every thrust from within or without.
History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.
Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.
I have only one yardstick by which I test every major problem and that yardstick is: Is it good for America?
What the church should be telling the worker is that the first demand religion makes on him is that he should be a good workman. If he is a carpenter he should be a competent carpenter. Church by all means on Sundays but what is the use of church if at the very center of life a man defrauds his neighbor and insults God by poor craftsmanship.
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.
I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America.
Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionist and rebel men and women who dare to disssent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.
More than ever before, in our country, this is the age of the individual. Endowed with the accumulated knowledge of centuries, armed with all the instruments of modern science, he is still assured personal freedom and wide avenues of expression so that he may win for himself, his family and his country greater material comfort, ease and happiness; greater spiritual satisfaction and contentment.
An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.
Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.
I despise all adjectives that try to describe people as liberal of conservative, rightist or leftist, as long as they stay in the useful part of the road.
Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.
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.
You do not lead by hitting people over the head that's assault, not leadership.
The most terrible job in warfare is to be a second lieutenant leading a platoon when you are on the battlefield.
Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.
I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.
We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom.
Peace and justice are two sides of the same coin.
We merely want to live in peace with all the world, to trade with them, to commune with them, to learn from their culture as they may learn from ours, so that the products of our toil may be used for our schools and our roads and our churches and not for guns and planes and tanks and ships of war.
What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight it's the size of the fight in the dog.
I would rather try to persuade a man to go along, because once I have persuaded him he will stick. If I scare him, he will stay just as long as he is scared, and then he is gone.
Plans are nothing, planning is everything.
Politics should be the part-time profession of every citizen.
Through unity of action we can be a veritable colossus in support of peace. No one can defeat us unless we first defeat ourselves. Every one of us must be guided by this truth.
There is one thing about being President, no one can tell you when to sit down.
The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.
Unlike presidential administrations, problems rarely have terminal dates.
If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They'll have enough to eat, a bed and roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human Being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government.
Americans, indeed all freemen, remember that in the final choice, a soldier's pack is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner's chains.
The spirit of man is more important than mere physical strength, and the spiritual fiber of a nation than its wealth.
We succeed only as we identify in life, or in war, or in anything else, a single overriding objective, and make all other considerations bend to that one objective.
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.
When you are in any contest,you should work as if there wereto the very last minutea chance to lose it. This is battle,This is politics,This is anything.
Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.
Unless each day can be looked back upon by an individual as one in which he has had some fun, some joy, some real satisfaction, that day is a loss.
The same day I saw my first horror camp, I visited every nook and cranny. I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.
Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in the blood of his followers and the sacrifices of his friends.
The sergeant is the Army.
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