Quotes About Leadership

One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency.

A good leader takes a little more than his share of the blame, a little less than his share of the credit.

A man to whom a woman cannot look up, she cannot love. Yet, it is marvelous how a woman contrives to find something to look up to in a man.

Political courage is not political suicide.

Women are the engine driving the growth in California's economy. Women make California's economy unique.

I feel good because I believe I have made progress in rebuilding the people's trust in their government.

My relationship to power and authority is that I'm all for it. People need somebody to watch over them. Ninety-five percent of the people in the world need to be told what to do and how to behave.

I welcome and seek your ideas, but do not bring me small ideas bring me big ideas to match our future.

To restore the trust of the people, we must reform the way the government operates.

We are a forward-looking people, and we must have a forward-looking government.

I speak directly to the people, and I know that the people of California want to have better leadership. They want to have great leadership. They want to have somebody that will represent them. And it doesn't matter if you're a Democrat or a Republican, young or old.

As president, Reagan worked very well with Democrats to do big things. It is true that he worked to reduce the size of government and cut federal taxes and he eliminated many regulations, but he also raised taxes when necessary.

Never follow the crowd, go where it's empty

So is that what's important to you? To be able to freeze in the middle of a scene and to have somebody give you your line? Wouldn't it be much better to go through Africa and show them how to dig wells and how to make vegetables grow and inspire them to plant?

99% of the people in the world need to be told what to do and how to behave.

I aimed to be a leader someday, but I knew it was important to learn obedience as well.

I believed that the only way you become a leading man is by treating yourself like a leading man and working your ass off. If you don't believe in yourself, then how will anyone else believe in you?

I don't believe a committee can write a book. It can, oh, govern a country, perhaps, but I don't believe it can write a book.

Just as a good chief executive officer keeps looking for ways to change because he or she knows that nothing will be the same in five years, so you, too, as the chief executive officer of your own life, must always be looking for better ways to make changes. You must be flexible enough to get around the new obstacles that are looming on the horizon, and you must be willing to change course if you have to.

Just when you think there's nothing to write about, Nixon says, 'I am not a crook.' Jimmy Carter says, 'I have lusted after women in my heart.' President Reagan says, 'I have just taken a urinalysis test, and I am not on dope.'

I would like to flood South Africa with black personages of all sorts of persuasions: writers, educators, businessmen, you name it. If you are black and have any clout at all, I would like to see you go to South Africa and look for yourself and come back and try to use the tools that you have at your command to try and help the brothers down there.

We blacks look for leadership in men and women of such youth and inexperience, as well as poverty of education and character, that it is no wonder that we sometimes seem rudderless.... We see basketball players and pop singers as possible role models, when nothing could be further, in most cases, from their capacities.

So what do the young hotshots need? Old people on product teams, old people in marketing, and old people in the C-suite. They need not just whiz-bang ideas but actual wisdom that only comes with years in the school of hard knocks.

When Ronald Reagan made his case to the American people, he didn't spend a lot of time talking about what he was fighting against. He spent most of his speech talking about who he was fighting for. This is what conservatives too often forget.