Quotes from James MacGregor Burns

Leadership, in short, is power governed by principle, directed toward raising people to their highest levels of personal motive and social morality.

The practice of leadership is not the same as the exercise of power.

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.

Those who remember only that the Roosevelts served hot dogs to the royals will be fascinated by this well-researched account of an historic and ennobling relationship - a great story!

Such leadership occurs when one or more persons engage with others in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality.

The ultimate test of practical leadership is the realization of intended, real change that meets people's enduring needs.

Leadership is one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth.

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.

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.

Politics seemed to have fallen to a new wartime low of spite and pettiness.

It lies in seeing that the most powerful influences consist of deeply human relationships in which two or more persons engage with one another.

When he goes to a wedding he wants to be the bride, and when he goes to a funeral he wants to be the corpse. (Commentary about Teddy Roosevelt, who was president when he came to give away his niece to Franklin).

Whereas underprivileged strata of society religiously hope for a better future, the overprivileged, disavowing any idea of transcendence, "live for the present by exploiting their great past.

Essential in a concept of power is the role of purpose.

Power has been defined as the production of intended effects, but the crux of the matter lies in the dimensions of "intent.

that power is first of all a relationship and not merely an entity to be passed around like a baton or hand grenade; that it involves the intention or purpose of both power holder and power recipient; and hence that it is collective, not merely the behavior of one person.

But history—a moving, organic network of causally related events—is hard to outwit or outflank. History embodies a logic and momentum of its own with resistances, rewards, and penalties. History soon outwitted the Whigs and left them in its dustbin.

In America, as Mr. Dooley once remarked, people build their triumphal arches out of brick so that they will have something handy to throw at the hero when he comes through.

They find "sources of strength in the self to develop the self.

The American constitutional system had been devised to prevent easy capture of the government by popular majorities.

equal, hierarchical, or unrelated? These relationships also define the exercise of power as a collective act. A psychological

Europeans had no prospects other than the "life after life" in heaven promised to true believers.

If ever our people become so sordid as to feel that all that counts is moneyed prosperity, ignoble well-being, effortless ease and comfort," he warned, "then this nation shall perish, as it will deserve to perish, from the earth.

He warned that those "who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.