Quotes from Richard Stengel

If we can teach a teacher we can reach more people.

And that is how he would describe courage: pretending to be brave. Fearlessness is stupidity. Courage is not letting the fear defeat you.

Conditions plus principles determine strategy.

By maturity, he meant that he learned to control those more youthful impulses, not that he was no longer stung or hurt or angry. It is not that you always know what to do or how to do it, it is that you are able to tamp down the emotions and anxieties that get in the way of seeing the world as it is. You can see through them, and that will see you through.

leadership at its most fundamental is about moving people in a certain direction—usually through changing the direction of their thinking and their actions. And the way to do that is not necessarily by charging out front and saying, "Follow me," but by empowering or pushing others to move forward ahead of you. It is through empowering others

The Renaissance idea of individualism never penetrated Africa like it did Europe and America. The African model of leadership is better expressed as ubuntu, the idea that people are empowered by other people, that we become our best selves through unselfish interaction with others.

Yes, emotions may be authentic, and authenticity is a modern virtue, but one can be authentic without being unnecessarily revealing.

Courage is not the absence of fear, he taught me. It's learning to overcome it.

leadership often means having to choose between two bad options and that good men have to make decisions that have bad consequences.

Trump's election was also an enormous challenge to American public diplomacy and to the American brand. So much of what we believed and promoted as part of the American Brand --free speech, freedom of religion, the power of diversity, equality before the law, a level playing field -- was challenged by brand Trump.

Just as pretending to be brave can become real courage, we may find that outfitting ourselves as the person we want to be brings us closer to becoming that person.

With the dozens of prisoners I spoke to and got to know, one of the only things, perhaps the only thing they missed about prison was that intimate, daily, powerful connection to prisoner number 46664. I missed it too. But I knew also,as those men knew, that it could not be restored, that it was born of a certain time and place.

Even after emerging from prison and becoming South Africa's first democratically elected president, he continued

Trust is a foundation of leadership. We trust that a leader is honest, able, and has a vision of where to go. But trust operates on an even deeper level. We trust that a leader is who he appears to be, that the public person and the private one are the same.

Unseen wounds are very painful, even more painful than the wounds you can see." It was clear to me that he was talking about himself too.

There is nothing beneath a leader.

He believes that, just as pretending to be brave can lead to acts of real bravery, seeing the good in other people improves the chances that they will reveal their better selves.

By behaving honorably, even to people who may not deserve it, he believes you can influence them to behave more honorably than they otherwise would. This

Mandela genuinely believed in the virtues of the team, and he knew that to get the best out of his own people, he had to make sure that they partook of the glory and, even more important, that they felt they were influencing his decisions.

That was the moment when I understood more clearly than ever before that the liberation struggle was not so much about liberating blacks from bondage, it was about liberating white people from fear.

EVEN ON A REMOTE but beautiful island, Mandela needed a place apart. A place where he could lose himself to find himself.

If we can teach a teacher we can reach more people.

Courage is not the absence of fear...