“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… Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.”

Chapters: 31. Victory Funeral

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“The supreme quality of leadership is integrity.”

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“Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.”

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“Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.”

from Speech, 1956

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“Once he called upon General McClellan, and the President went over to the General's house and General McClellan decided he did not want to see the President, and went to bed. Lincoln's friends criticized him severely for allowing a mere General to treat him that way. And he said, 'All I want out of General McClellan is a victory, and if to hold his horse will bring it, I will gladly hold his horse.'”

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“We seek victory—not over any nation or people—but over ignorance, poverty, disease, and human degradation wherever they may be found.”

from State of the Union (1959)

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“A democracy smugly disdainful of new ideas would be a sick democracy. A democracy chronologically fearful of new ideas would be a dying democracy.”

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“Opposed to the idea of two hostile, embittered wolds in perpetual conflict, we envisage a single world community as yet unrealized but advancing rapidly.”

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“One hundred and eighty-one years ago, our forefathers started a revolution that still goes on.”

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“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. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the seat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the houses of its children.”

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“War in our time has become an anachronism. Whatever the case in the past, war in the future can serve no useful purpose.”

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“Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

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“Gandhi not only spoke against the caste system he acted against it. He took 'untouchables' by the hand and led them into the temples from which they had been excluded. To equal that, President Eisenhower would have taken a Negro child by the hand and led her into Central High School in Little Rock.”

— Martin Luther King Jr. 1929 – 1968 CE
Leading world influence for equality, peace, non-violence, and poverty alleviation

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“In 1957, Congress sanctioned 'the Eisenhower Doctrine' which pledged the US to aid any Middle East nation threatened by 'International Communism'... Whenever an impoverished people rises in protest against economic exploitation or political tyranny, we are pledged, on request from an endangered government to suppress the revolt.”

— Will Durant 1885 – 1981 CE
Philosophy apostle and popularizer of history's lessons
from Fallen Leaves (2014)

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