Explore Quotes on Leadership

When you're leading, don't talk.

We must be part of the general staff at the inception, rather than the ambulance drivers at the bitter end.

To be a leader in the Church has always required strength and faith beyond the merely human.

But me thought it lessened my esteem of a king, that he should not be able to command the rain.

Most hierarchies are nowadays so cumbered with rules and traditions, and so bound in by public laws, that even high employees do not have to lead anyone anywhere, in the sense of pointing out the direction and setting the pace. They simply follow precedents, obey regulations, and move at the head of the crowd. Such employees lead only in the sense that the curved wooden figurehead leads the ship .

I believe that the mindset that allows you to spend your working life thanking and congratulating people rather than being unpleasant to them is the mainstay of good leadership.

A councilor ought not to sleep the whole night through, a man to whom the populace is entrusted, and who has many responsibilities.

Those who are to change significantly that which they freshly encounter must themselves be changed by the changing of it.

The only test of leadership is that somebody follows.

Leaders of men are later remembered less for the usefulness of what they have achieved than for the sweep of their endeavors.

Thou seekest disciples? Then thou seekest ciphers.

In any series of elements to be controlled, a selected small fraction, in terms of numbers of elements, always accounts for a large fraction in terms of effect.

If the modern leader doesn't know the facts, he is in grave trouble, but rarely do the facts provide unqualified guidance.

In war, mere appearances have had all the effect of realities; and that a person, under a firm persuasion that he can command resources, virtually has them; that very prospect inspiring him with hope and boldness in his exertions.

We are not altogether here to tolerate. We are here to resist, to control and vanquish withal.

A good man likes a hard boss. I don't mean a nagging boss or a grouchy boss. I mean a boss who insists on things being done right and on time; a boss who is watching things closely enough so that he knows a good job from a poor one. Nothing is more discouraging to a good man than a boss who is not on the job, and who does not know whether things are going well or badly.

In the birth of societies it is the chiefs of states who give it its special character; and afterward it is this special character that forms the chiefs of state.

Leadership of a world-economy is an experience of power which may blind the victor to the march of history.

I say no body of men are fit to make Presidents, judges and generals, unless they themselves supply the best specimens of the same; and that supplying one or two such specimens illuminates the whole body for a thousand years.

While once it was the rank and file that cheered with all the partisan passions at their heights, today it is the party leaders who are cheering themselves; and all by themselves. The mob that is their audience is in one vast universal trance, thinking about something else.

A small step in a good direction.