Quotes from James MacGregor Burns

Leaders are not pale reflectors of major social conflicts; they play up some, play down others, ignore still others.

Woodrow Wilson called for leaders who, by boldly interpreting the nation's conscience, could lift a people out of their everyday selves. That people can be lifted into their better selves is the secret of transforming leadership.

In real life, the most practical advice for leaders is not to treat pawns like pawns, nor princes like princes, but all persons like persons.

that the effectiveness of leaders must be judged not by their press clippings but by actual social change measured by intent and by the satisfaction of human needs and expectations;

The power holder may be the person whose "private motives are displaced onto public objects and rationalized in terms of public interest

A leader and a tyrant are polar opposites.

Moral leadership emerges from, and always returns to, the fundamental wants and needs, aspirations, and values of the followers.

In brief, leaders with motive and power bases tap followers' motives in order to realize the purposes of both leaders and followers.

Power wielders may treat people as things. Leaders may not.

The nation, the Supreme Court has said, has "no right to expect that it will always have wise and humane rulers, sincerely attached to the principles of the Constitution. Wicked men, ambitious of power, with hatred of liberty and contempt of law, may fill the place once occupied by Washington and Lincoln." The

There is an important difference between the politician who is simply an able tactician, and the politician who is a creative political

Just as Marx himself had been brilliant and prophetic in his analysis of capitalism but vague—perhaps deliberately so—about the process of revolutionary change that would finish it off

Above all, how did liberty relate to other great aims? Some Americans felt that the pursuit of liberty ultimately would safeguard other values, such as order and equality; others saw order and authority as prior goals in protecting liberty.

as a luxury liner, it had been converted to wartime use; with blacked-out portholes and gray camouflage paint, it had

he would run, the Missouri Senator told Roosevelt's men, "but why the hell didn't he tell me in the first place?

above all, Locke's transforming idea that government was established and maintained by the consent of the governed, in which all men had an equal voice. "Who shall be Judge whether the Prince or Legislative act contrary to their Trust?" he had asked

above all, Locke's transforming idea that government was established and maintained by the consent of the governed, in which all men had an equal voice. "Who shall be Judge whether the Prince or Legislative act contrary to their Trust?" he had asked, and answered, "The People shall be Judge." The

The small farm, a historian observed, was an unsurpassed school for boyhood but an intellectual prison for manhood.

Many unions discriminated against them, in part because of their fear that if Negroes came in, white workers might well go out. The future looked no more encouraging; in December 1940 less than 2 per cent of the trainees under defense pre-employment and refresher courses were black. Negroes could

In the final quarter of our century that life-and-death engagement with leadership has given way to the cult of personality, to a "gee whiz" approach to celebrities.

They should stick to knitting," Napoleon had once said.

Columbia Law School and Coolidge's Attorney

It lies not only in recognizing that not all human influences are necessarily coercive and exploitative, that not all transactions among persons are mechanical, impersonal, ephemeral. It lies in seeing that the most powerful influences consist of deeply human relationships in which two or more persons engage with one another.

Divorced from ethics, leadership is reduced to management and politics to mere technique.