Despite Dwight Eisenhower's propensity to avoiding public appearances and addresses, his words found their way in to history books, both as a military hero and as a president. Following are some of Eisenhower's best quotes.

• "Yes, of course they [atomic weapons] would be used. In any combat where these things can be used on strictly military targets and for strictly military purposes, I see no reason why they shouldn't be used just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else."
• "We are in the era of the thermonuclear bomb that can obliterate cities and can be delivered across continents. With such weapons, war has become, not just tragic, but preposterous."
• "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 sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children...This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
• "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex."
• "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."
• "How far can you go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?"
• "War settles nothing."
• "When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war."
• "There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs."
• "I do not believe that any political campaign justifies the declaration of a moratorium on ordinary common sense."
• "Each of them [Congressmen] thinks of himself as intensely patriotic; but it does not take the average member long to conclude that his first duty to his country is to get himself reelected. This subconscious conviction leads to a capacity for rationalization that is almost unbelievable."
• "I can't imagine any set of circumstances that would ever induce me to send Federal troops into a Federal Court and into any area to enforce the orders of a Federal Court, because I believe that the common sense of America will never require it." (In reference to sending federal troops to integrate schools)
• "There is in our affairs at home, a middle way between untrammeled freedom of the individual and the demands for the welfare of the whole nation. This way must avoid government by bureaucracy as carefully as it avoids neglect of the helpless."
• "If you give me a week, I might think of one." (In response to a reporter's question about whether Richard Nixon had produced a major idea while serving as Eisenhower's Vice-president)