Quotes on Leadership

A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.

There is no substitute for accurate knowledge. Know yourself, know your business, know your men.

Leadership in today's world requires far more than a large stock of gunboats and a hard fist at the conference table.

I never thought in terms of being a leader. I thought very simply in terms of helping people.

Leadership is not about titles, positions or flowcharts. It is about one life influencing another.

You will achieve more in this world through acts of mercy than you will through acts of retribution.

True leaders understand that leadership is not about them but about those they serve. It is not about exalting themselves but about lifting others up.

Some are young people who don't know who they are, what they can be or even want to be. They are afraid, but they don't know of what. They are angry, but they don't know at whom. They are rejected and they don't know why. All they want is to be somebody.

Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.

There is something that is much more scarce, something finer far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability.

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?

People in any organization, including bureaucrats and politicians, are always attached to the obsolete; the obsolescent; the things that should have worked but didn't; the things that once were productive and no longer are.

Imagination is a very high sort of seeing.

The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say "I." And that's not because they have trained themselves not to say "I." They don't think "I." They think "we"; they think "team." They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don't sidestep it, but "we" gets the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.

Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.

Growth inside fuels growth outside.

If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business. I do the very best I know how - the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what's said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

We're here for a reason. I believe a bit of the reason is to throw little torches out to lead people through the dark.

It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.

Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it. No involvement, no commitment.

An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens.