Yesterday after a visit to the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History, I linked to President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address (1961). There was a specific quote I was thinking of, and I couldn’t find it. I was pretty sure it was in his farewell speech, famous for its coining the phrase “Military-Industrial Complex”. Turns out it was in a different speech. I didn’t realize how quotable Eisenhower was. Didn’t know he was from Abilene, TX either. Maybe the last decent Republican president this country has had. A nice bunch of Eisenhower Quotes. The one I was thinking of is his “Cross of Iron” speech.

“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. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road. the world has been taking. 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.”

Address “The Chance for Peace” Delivered Before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 4/16/53