I like Ike

Each day I have a posting of someone famous and things that they have said. Today, it was President Eisenhower. I never thought much of Ike, as his tenancy in the W.H. was marked with civility and quiet, something Lao Tze taught me is the sign of a great leader. Still, who knew about Ike?
I became intrigued by his wit. Here are some 25 thoughts, many pertinent today:

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

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

3. Do not needlessly endanger your lives until I give you the signal.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.

7. How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?

8. I despise people who go to the gutter on either the right or the left and hurl rocks at those in the center.

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

10. 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.

11. If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.

12. If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom.

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

14. 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.

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

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

17. Only Americans can hurt America.

18. Only strength can cooperate. Weakness can only beg.

19. Our real problem, then, is not our strength today; it is rather the vital necessity of action today to ensure our strength tomorrow.

20. Pessimism never won any battle.

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

22. Some people wanted champagne and caviar when they should have had beer and hot dogs.

23. Some years ago I became president of Columbia University and learned within 24 hours to be ready to speak at the drop of a hat, and I learned something more, the trustees were expected to be ready to speak at the passing of the hat.

24. The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice; their choice!

25, The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office.