An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.

Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book.

Every gun that is fired, every warship launched signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

Farming looks easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from a corn field.

If all that Americans want is security they can go to prison. They'll have enough to eat, a bed and a 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.

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

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.

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

In the final choice a soldier's pack is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner's chains.

I think you know that I believe we must be strong militarily, but beyond a certain point military strength can become a national weakness.

Leadership: The art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.

Pull the string, and it will follow wherever you wish. Push it, and it will go nowhere at all.

The older I get, the more wisdom I find in the ancient rule of taking first things first -- a process which often reduces the most complex human problems to manageable proportions.

These men came here...to storm these beaches for one purpose only, not to gain anything for ourselves, not to fulfill any ambitions that America had for conquest, but just to preserve freedom...Many thousands of men have died for such ideals as these...but these young men were cut off in their prime. (on the Normandy invasion)

Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.

Weakness cannot cooperate with anything. Only strength can cooperate.

We have never stopped sin by passing laws; and in the same way, we are not going to take a great moral ideal and achieve it merely by law.

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 I was a small boy in Kansas, a friend of mine and I went fishing. I told him 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.