We ... must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow.

You can't have this kind of war. There just aren't enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.

Most things which are urgent are not important, and most things which are important are not urgent.

My ambition in the Army was to make everybody I worked for regretful when I was ordered to other duty.

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.

Some day there is going to be a man sitting in my present chair who has not been raised in the military services and who will have little understanding of where slashes in their estimates can be made with little or no damage. If that should happen while we still have the state of tension that now exists in the world, I shudder to think of what could happen in this country

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.