Quotes About Leadership

Primus inter pares [First among equals].

Divide et impera [Divide and rule].

There always appears, on the ruins of tyranny, a man taller than the others, a man that everyone sees, that everyone listens to and this one is the master of rubble.

All these men who say that the people must govern themselves, really govern the people.

It is necessary, either that the government devours the country, or that the country absorbs the government.

Run a home like you would a small business and treat it with the same seriousness.

From Switzerland in the south, throughout central Europe and Germany, and as far north and west as England, where Henry VIII burned a dozen Anabaptists at the stake, thousands of men and women were subjected to the most terrible persecution. Many of the more moderate leaders who abjured violence were martyred, leaving a gap in the leadership that was often filled by men of little education but much passion.

I can't stand politicians who wear God on their sleeves.

My message to Sinn Fein is clear. The settlement train is leaving. I want you on that train. But it is leaving anyway and I will not allow it to wait for you.

Whatever the dangers of the action we take, the dangers of inaction are far, far greater.

Well, Margaret Thatcher is perhaps the politician I have the greatest admiration for. I am reading her memoirs at the moment.

The British are special. The world knows it. In our innermost thoughts we know it. This is the greatest nation on earth. So it has been an honour to serve it. I give my thanks to you, the British people, for the times that I have succeeded, and my apologies to you for the times I have fallen short. But good luck.

So, of course, the visions are painted in the colours of the rainbow, and the reality is sketched in duller tones of black and white and grey. But I ask you to accept one thing. Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right. I may have been wrong. That is your call. But believe one thing, if nothing else. I did what I thought was right for our country.

I couldn't live with myself if I thought that these big strategic choices for my generation were there, and I wasn't even making them or I was making them according to what was expedient rather than what I actually thought was right.

That's the art of leadership. To make sure that what shouldn't happen, doesn't happen.

There were people who got me very involved in politics. But then there was also a book. It was a trilogy, a biography of Trotsky by Isaac Deutscher, which made a very deep impression on me and gave me a love of political biography for the rest of my life.

I understand there is a need for a stable and orderly transition to that leadership, but that people should give me the space to ensure that happens and that this debate is not best conducted in the pages of the Mail on Sunday.

Yes, I did have to struggle very hard to get this [the vote on the Iraq war] through, but the reason I did it was because I thought it was the right thing to do. I didn't take this on myself... just because I thought, 'Let's give myself a really hard time for a couple of years!'

It is not a sensible or intelligent response for us in Europe to ridicule American argument or parody their political leadership.

What amazes me is how many people are happy for Saddam to stay. They ask why we don't get rid of Mugabe, why not the Burmese lot. Yes, let's get rid of them all. I don't because I can't, but when you can you should.

If only Nixon could go to China, only Obama can end the self-memorialization obsession that is presidential libraries - by not building such a shrine.

She is in charge of everything, but no one knows. It is a tremendous burden, she says, to be responsible for every little thing, every infant born, every leaf falling from every tree, every wave that breaks onto the beach, every ant on its journey.

Werner is beginning to see, approaching his sixteenth birthday, that what the führer really requires is boys. Great rows of them walking to the conveyor belt to climb on.

The locusts have no king, yet all of them go out in ranks.