A famous Frenchman once said, War has become far too important to entrust to the generals. Today, business, I think, should be saying: Politics have become far too important to entrust to the politicians.
A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.
An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.
But these calculations overlook the decisive element: what counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight- it's the size of the fight in the dog.
Censorship, in my opinion, is a stupid and shallow way of approaching the solution to any problem.
Change based on principle is progress. Constant change without principle becomes chaos.
Dollars and guns are no substitutes for brains and will power.
Don't join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.
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.
Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.
Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels- men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.
Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in blood of his followers and sacrifices of his friends.
I am not here, of course, as one pretending to any expertness on questions of youth and children- except in the sense that, within their own families, all grandfathers are experts on these matters.
I believe that the United States as a government, if it is going to be true to its own founding documents, does have the job of working toward that time when there is no discrimination made on such inconsequential reason as race, color, or religion.
I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity.
I have no use for those- regardless of their political party- who hold some foolish dream of spinning the clock back to days when unorganized labor was a huddled, almost helpless mass.
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.
If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.
In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well.
Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.
Neither a wise nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.
Never lose your temper, except intentionally.
Now, the education of our children is of national concern, and if they are not educated properly, it is a national calamity.
Oh, that lovely title, ex-President.
People talk about the middle of the road as though it were unacceptable. Actually, all human problems, excepting morals, come into the gray areas. Things are not all black and white. There have to be compromises. The middle of the road is all of the usable surface. The extremes, right and left, are in the gutters.
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. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things... a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.
Some politician some years ago said that bad officials are elected by good voters who do not vote.
Teachers need our active support and encouragement. They are doing one of the most necessary and exacting jobs in the land. They are developing our most precious national resource: our children, our future citizens.
The gravity of the time is such that every new avenue of peace, no matter how dimly discernible, should be explored.
The hope of the world is that wisdom can arrest conflict between brothers. I believe that war is the deadly harvest of arrogant and unreasoning minds.
The only way to win the next world war is to prevent it.
The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.
The world moves, and ideas that were once good are not always good.
There can be no law if we were to invoke one code of international conduct for those who oppose us and another for our friends.
There is an old saw in the services: that which is not inspected deteriorates.
Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.
To blend, without coercion, the individual good and the common good is the essence of citizenship in a free country.
Today in America unions have a secure place in our industrial life. Only a handful of unreconstructed reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions. Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice.
Un-American activity cannot be prevented or routed out by employing un-American methods; to preserve freedom we must use the tools that freedom provides.
Unlike presidential administrations, problems rarely have terminal dates.
We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it.
We are so proud of our guarantees of freedom in thought and speech and worship, that, unconsciously, we are guilty of one of the greatest errors that ignorance can make- we assume our standard of values is shared by all other humans in the world.
We have erased segregation in those areas of national life to which Federal authority clearly extends. So doing in this, my friends, we have neither sought nor claimed partisan credit, and all such actions are nothing more- nothing less than the rendering of justice. And we have always been aware of this great truth: the final battle against intolerance is to be fought- not in the chambers of any legislature- but in the hearts of men.
We must be ready to dare all for our country. For history does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.
We need an adequate defense, but every arms dollar we spend above adequacy has a long-term weakening effect upon the nation and its security.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.
Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America.
When I was a small boy in Kansas, a friend of mine and I went fishing and as we sat there in the warmth of the summer afternoon on a river bank, 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.
You do not lead by hitting people over the head. That's assault, not leadership.
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