You need to have good people: honourable, capable, committed in politics, standing in public office. It's not a guarantee, but it's the ideal we have to aim for.
Interpretation
Good leadership requires honorable and committed individuals in public office.
The quote highlights the importance of having ethical and capable individuals in politics, asserting that while it may not be a surety for success, striving for such ideals is crucial. It emphasizes the role of integrity and commitment in governance, suggesting that the quality of leaders significantly impacts society and political outcomes.
In practice
A motivational speech about political engagement during a community meeting.
If we did not have a sense of who we were, how we got here, why we want to achieve something - which, on the face of it, on the logic of it, is probably not worth trying - and prove that logic wrong, then you wouldn't succeed; then you would just evaporate.
You need people who have their own views, whose views you respect, whom you can have a productive disagreement with, and work out ideas which you might not have come up with, or who improve on ideas you had.
Just as our forefathers saved and invested to build what we, the current generation, are enjoying today, so, too, we must plant trees so that our sons and daughters, and their sons and daughters, can enjoy the shade.
When people say they don't want a nanny state, they are, in fact, in a conflicted state of mind. On the one hand, they want to do whatever they want and not be stopped. On the other hand, if something goes wrong, they want to be rescued.
No government prospers by saying, 'I don't need to do anything. Just by being there, we have made the country thrive.'
The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan.
Most of my work has been in corporations, studying how you build an organization that helps people to identify and work to their strengths.
There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.
Although most executives pay lip service to the idea of hiring for cultural fit, few have the courage or discipline to make it the primary criteria for bringing someone into the company.
Now from a distance, I look back on what the Corps taught me: to think like men of action, and to act like men of thought!
A skillful commander is not overbearing. A skillful fighter does not become angry. A skillful conqueror does not compete with people. One who is skillful in using men puts himself below them. This is called the strength to use men. This is called matching Heaven, The highest principle of old.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.