I always thought I was Jeanne d'Arc and Bonaparte. How little one knows oneself.
Charles De GaulleRead
One cannot govern with 'buts'.
Interpretation
Leadership requires decisiveness and clarity; ambiguity and excuses hinder effective governance.
This quote by Charles De Gaulle emphasizes the importance of clear and decisive leadership. When governing, making excuses or relying on uncertainties ('buts') can lead to ineffective decision-making and problems in authority. True leaders take responsibility and act without hesitation, fostering trust and stability.
In practice
A public speaking event discussing the qualities of effective leadership.
I always thought I was Jeanne d'Arc and Bonaparte. How little one knows oneself.
Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.
Today we are crushed by the sheer weight of the mechanized forces hurled against us, but we can still look to the future in which even greater mechanized forces will bring us victory. Therein lies the destiny of the world.
The perfection preached in the gospels never yet built an empire. Every man of action has a strong dose of egotism, pride, hardness, and cunning.
One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day was; one cannot judge life until death.
Soyons fermes, purs et fidèles ; au bout de nos peines, il y a la plus grande gloire du monde, celle des hommes qui n'ont pas cédé. [Let us be firm, pure and faithful; at the end of our sorrow, there is the greatest glory of the world, that of the men who did not give in.]
I always lose the election in the polls, and I always win it on election day.
Be the hunter, not the hunted: Never allow your unit to be caught with its guard down.
Quarterbacks need to make their team better. If it's a bad team, they can even make a bad team better.
One of the little-celebrated powers of Presidents (and other high government officials) is to listen to their critics with just enough sympathy to ensure their silence.
An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in the State Department.
We deal, unfortunately, every single day with leaders of countries who are responsible for actions we find either objectionable or abhorrent, whether it's Vladimir Putin, whether it's Xi Jinping, whether it's any others on a long list of people I can name. But we find ways to deal with them.
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