Extremes to the right and to the left of any political dispute are always wrong.
Never send a battalion to take a hill if a regiment is available.
I despise people who go to the gutter on either the right or the left and hurl rocks at those in the center.
It is far more important to be able to hit the target than it is to haggle over who makes a weapon or who pulls a trigger.
This desk of mine is one at which a man may die, but from which he cannot resign.
We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom.
I never saw a pessimistic general win a battle.
I can think of nothing more boring for the American people than to have to sit in their living rooms for a whole half hour looking at my face on their television screens.
Pull the string, and it will follow wherever you wish. Push it, and it will go nowhere at all.
Un-American activity cannot be prevented or routed out by employing un-American methods; to preserve freedom we must use the tools that freedom provides.
If progress is to be steady we must have long term guides extending far ahead.
Through unity of action we can be a veritable colossus in support of peace. No one can defeat us unless we first defeat ourselves. Every one of us must be guided by this truth.
May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.
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.
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.
Work should be for all of us a word as honorable and appealing as patriotism.
Help the Cubans to the utmost counseling his successor while handing over the reins. We cannot let Castro’s government go on.
As it is an ancient truth that freedom cannot be legislated into existence, so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be censored into existence.
Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can complel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
The winning of war – the effectiveness in such things – is in the heart, in the determination, in the faith. It is in our beliefs in our country, in our God, everything that goes to make up America.