leadership Quotes

“Well . . . I believe, when statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their public duties . . . they lead their country by a short route to chaos.”

“Democracy is a poor system; the only thing that can be said for it is that it’s eight times as good as any other method. Its worst fault is that its leaders reflect their constituents— low level, but what can you expect?”

“My methods of leadership are what brought me to this base.”

“I suspected that each of my teammates hoped as fervently as I that Hall had been careful to weed out clients of dubious ability, and would have the means to protect each of us from one another’s shortcomings.”

“Don’t be a pawn, when you’re meant to be the king.”

“I shall be up before you are awake; I shall be afield before you are up; and I shall have breakfasted before you are afield. In short, I shall astonish you all.”

“It isn’t enough, what I’ve done in the past, defying the Capitol in the Games, providing a rallying point. I must now become the actual leader, the face, the voice, the embodiment of the revolution.”

“Our mind is powerful. Think Bigger. Dream bigger. Act bigger – and you’ll live a much bigger version of your life!”

“Power is of the individual mind, but the mind’s power is not enough. Power of the body decides everything in the end, and only Might is Right.”

“Why can’t you harness Might so that it works for Right?… The Might is there, in the bad half of people, and you can’t neglect it.”

Who gives more shape to sentient history: the good, who adhere to the tried and true, or those who seek to rouse beings from their stupor and lead them to glory?

Beings may elect their leaders, but the Force has elected us.

“When a leader of the Pack has missed his kill, he is called the Dead Wolf as long as he lives, which is not long, as a rule.”

“The gender stereotypes introduced in childhood are reinforced throughout our lives and become self-fulfilling prophesies. Most leadership positions are held by men, so women don’t expect to achieve them, and that becomes one of the reasons they don’t.”

“A wise man heeds all matters great or small.”

“Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.”

“Show respect for those in power, but don’t follow them blindly.”

“A State for one man is no State at all.”

“A good general Reports successes and conceals mishaps.”

“It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as a man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class.”

“We fought and won the race in space and listened to the cries of the Apollo 1 crew. With great resolve and personal anger, we picked up the pieces, pounded them together, and went on the attack again. We were the ones in the trenches of space and with only the tools of leadership, trust, and teamwork, we contained the risks and made the conquest of space possible.”

“Lincoln was not great because he was born in a log cabin, but because he got out of it.”

“High-risk leadership beckons many, but few accept the call.”

“Leadership is fragile. It is more a matter of mind and heart than resources, and it seemed that we no longer had the heart for those things that demanded discipline, commitment, and risk.”

“When the Avro Arrow, the world’s top performing interceptor aircraft, was canceled by the Canadian government, the engineers came south to the United States and into the Space Task Group, providing much of the instant maturity and leadership needed for Mercury.”

“If you want to rebel, rebel from inside the system.That’s much more powerful than rebelling outside the system.”

“So, if a son that is by his father sent about
merchandise do sinfully miscarry upon the sea,
the imputation of his wickedness, by your rule,
should be imposed upon his father that sent him.”

“Upon the king! Let us our lives, our souls, our
debts, our careful wives, our children, and our sins
lay on the King!
We must bear all. O hard condition,
Twin-born with greatness, subject to the breath
Of every fool, whose sense no more can feel
But his own wringing.”

“Yet, in reason, no man should possess him
with any appearance of fear, lest he, by showing it,
should dishearten his army.”

“That’s what the leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions, people carried with them some central explanation of themselves. Stories full of terror and wonder, studded with events that still haunted or inspired them. Sacred stories.”

“No matter how vital we think the role of leadership in the rise of a mass movement, there is no doubt that the leader cannot create the conditions which make the rise of a movement possible. He cannot conjure a movement out of the void. There has to be an eagerness to follow and obey, and an intense dissatisfaction with things as they are, before movement and leader can make their appearance.”

″‘You, our friend, our intelligence, our invisible protector’, said he, ‘accept this commission; you have merited it more than any of us by your wisdom and your counsels...‘”

“Keep the commission D’Artagnan-the profession of arms suits you; you will be a brave and adventurous captain.”

“The bottom line on culture and grit is: If you want to be grittier, find a gritty culture and join it. If you’re a leader, and you want the people in your organization to be grittier, create a gritty culture.”

Do not imagine, comrades, that leadership is a pleasure!

“Not so, however, with the besieged. Animated by the words, and stimulated by the examples of their leaders, they had found their courage, and maintained their ancient reputation, with a zeal that did justice to the stern character of their commander.”

“Some leaders think all of life and business is a start-up. ‘More, more, more,’ is their mantra. That can kill a business that could have had very good life if someone had seen that sowing had to stop and operating had to begin.”

“When the war was over, while Colonel Aureliano Buendía was sneaking about through the narrow trails of permanent subversion, General Moncada was named magistrate of Macondo. He wore civilian clothes, replaced the soldiers with unarmed policemen, enforced the amnesty laws, and helped a few families of Liberals who had been killed in the war.”

“Most of us, in ways that we are not entirely aware of, automatically associate leadership ability with imposing physical stature. We have a sense of what a leader is supposed to look like, and that stereotype is so powerful that when someone fits it, we simply become blind to other considerations.”

“Allowing people to operate without having to explain themselves constantly turns out to be like the rule of agreement in improv. It enables rapid cognition.”

“All the perks, all the benefits and advantages you may get for the rank or position you hold, they aren’t meant for you. They are meant for the role you fill. And when you leave your role, which eventually you will, they will give the ceramic cup to the person who replaces you. Because you only ever deserved a Styrofoam cup.”

“It is necessary for a prince to have the people friendly.”

“The true price of leadership is the willingness to place the needs of others above your own.”

“The red mist of anger cleared suddenly from Daniel’s mind. He looked at the man who had been his leader. He saw the coarsened face with its tangle of dirty beard. He saw the hard mouth, the calculating little eyes. He saw a man he had never really looked at before.”

“Good leadership is like exercise. We do not see any improvement to our bodies with day-to-day comparisons. In fact, if we only compare the way our bodies look on a given day to how they looked the previous day, we would think our efforts had been wasted. It’s only when we compare pictures of ourselves over a period of weeks or months that we can see a stark difference. The impact of leadership is best judged over time.”

“I know of no case study in history that describes an organization that has been managed out of a crisis. Every single one of them was led.”

“Leadership is not a license to do less; it is a responsibility to do more.”

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”

“Let us all be the leaders we wish we had.”

“The rank of office is not what makes someone a leader. Leadership is the choice to serve others with or without any formal rank.”

Strike the shepherd and the sheep will scatter.

“It is not the genius at the top giving directions that makes people great. It is great people that make the guy at the top look like a genius.”

“Stress and anxiety at work have less to do with the work we do and more to do with weak management and leadership.”

“The responsibility for finding and fixing problems should be assigned to every employee, from the most senior manager to the lowliest person on the production line.”

“Many of these leaders, however (perhaps due to the natural and understandable biases against pedagogy) have ended up using the ‘educational’ methods employed by the oppressor. They deny pedagogical action in the liberation process, but they use propaganda to convince.”

“Leadership takes work. It takes time and energy. The effects are not always easily measured and they are not always immediate. Leadership is always a commitment to human beings.”

“Find a way to look positive and proactive. Find a way that everybody’s morale stays up.”

“Leaps of greatness require the combined problem-solving ability of people who trust each other.”

“None of my ten friends, even today, ascribes moral evil to Hitler, although most of them think (after the fact) that he made fatal strategical mistakes which even they themselves might have made at the time. His worst mistake was his selection of advisers—a backhand tribute to the Leader’s virtues of trustfulness and loyalty, to his very innocence of the knowledge of evil, fully familiar to those who have heard partisans of F. D. R. or Ike explain how things went wrong.”

Akela said nothing. He was thinking of the time that comes to every leader of every pack when his strength goes from him and he gets feebler and feebler, till at last he is killed by the wolves and a new leader comes up—to be killed in his turn.

“In the future, there will be no female leaders. There will just be leaders.”“In the future, there will be no female leaders. There will just be leaders.”

“The person more qualified to lead is not the physically stronger person. It is the more intelligent, the more knowledgeable, the more creative, more innovative. And there are no hormones for those attributes.”

I’m cap’n here because I’m the best man by a long sea-mile.

The captain has said too much or he has said too little, and I’m bound to say that I require an explanation of his words.

“Shut up,” said Ralph absently. He lifted the conch. “Seems to me we ought to have a chief to decide things.”

“A chief! A chief!”

“I ought to be chief,” said Jack with simple arrogance, “because I’m chapter chorister and head boy. I can sing C sharp.”

“Something deep in Ralph spoke for him.

‘I’m chief. I’ll go. Don’t argue.’ ”

Our masters have not heard the people’s voice for generations and it is much, much louder than they care to remember.

“Did you see his body? No. Did anyone? No. Nothing could kill him. He made rabbits bigger than they’ve ever been—braver, more skillful, more cunning. I know we paid for it. Some gave their lives. It was worth it, to feel we were Efrafans. For the first time ever, rabbits didn’t go scurrying away. The elil feared us. And that was on account of Woundwort—him and no one but him. We weren’t good enough for the General. Depend upon it, he’s gone to start another warren somewhere else. But no Efrafan officer will ever forget him.”

“Hazel’s anxiety and the reason for it were soon known to all the rabbits and there was not one who did not realize what they were up against. There was nothing very startling in what he had said. He was simply the one—as a Chief Rabbit ought to be—through whom a strong feeling, latent throughout the warren, had come to the surface.”

“Joe Starks was the name, yeah Joe Starks from in and through Georgy. Been workin’ for white folks all his life. Saved up some money – round three hundred dollars, yes indeed, right here in his pocket. Kept hearin’ ‘bout them buildin’ a new state down heah in Floridy and sort of wanted to come. But he was makin’ money where he was. But when he heard all about ‘em makin’ a town all outa colored folks, he knowed dat was de place he wanted to be. He had always wanted to be a big voice, but de white folks had all de sayso where he come from and everywhere else, exceptin’ de place dat colored folks was buildin’ theirselves. Dat was right too. De man dat built things oughta boss it. Let colored folks build thing too if dey wants to crow over somethin’. ”

“A prince, therefore, ought always to take counsel.”

“A prince who is not wise himself will never take good advice.”

“If we do not abide in prayer, we will abide in temptation.”

“The President of the United States is not subject to quite the same test of political courage as a Senator.”

″ The American system of Government could not function if every man in a position of responsibility approached each problem... as a problem in higher mathematics.”

“Leaders must always operate with the understanding that they are part of something greater than themselves and their own personal interests.”

“After all, there can be no leadership where there is no team.”

“You can’t make people listen to you. You can’t make them execute. That might be a temporary solution for a simple task. But to implement real change, to drive people to accomplish something truly complex or difficult or dangerous—you can’t make people do those things. You have to lead them.”

“Successful people are good in four areas: relationships, equipping, attitude, and leadership.”

“The slopes to treachery from the dizzy heights of revolutionary leadership are always so steep and slippery that leaders, however well intentioned, can never build their fences too high”

“He didn’t know why he had become President of the Galaxy, except that it seemed a fun thing to be.”

“Headship is the divine calling of a husband to take primary responsibility for Christ-like, servant leadership, protection, and provision in the home.”

“It’s never necessary to tell me that you think I’m right. We’ll just... assume it.”

“I’ve lived with these men, sir, for two and a half years and I will not order them all to their deaths.”

Let all plans of terrorism against our country, our leadership, and our people be dried up at the root, never to manifest, in Jesus’s name. ”

“Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.”