UPSC Express

​Dwight D. Eisenhower

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

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

You do not lead by hitting people over the head – that’s assault, not leadership.

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

Plans are nothing; planning is everything.

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

What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight – it’s the size of the fight in the dog.

We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.

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

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.

May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.

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

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.

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

Don’t join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.

I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it.

Peace and justice are two sides of the same coin.

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

The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.

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.

Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.