Quotes About Leadership

If it is necessary for us to do anything [in view of peace], direct us and architect. ???? ???' ????, ?? ?? ??? ????, ????? ?????????????.

But even in this perilous situation, the popular leader Cleophon managed to persuade the Athenians to reject the chance of a negotiated peace offered by Sparta after Arginusae, so that it is hardly surprising that the Athenians responded so warmly to the parabasis of Frogs, where the Chorus aptly upbraids them for choosing as leaders and fighters not the best men but the worst, just as they have traded their gold and silver coinage for base metal (686-705, 717-37).

El guiar al pueblo no es cosa de un hombre culto ni de buenos principios, sino de un ignorante y bellaco (Los caballeros, 424 aC)

A demagogue must be neither an educated nor an honest man; he must be ignorant and a rogue.

Great men are always of a nature originally melancholy.

To lead an orchestra, you must turn your back on the crowd

Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.

He who is to be a good ruler must have first been ruled

he who had never learned to obey cannot be a good commander

Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.

The government is everywhere sovereign in the state, and the constitution is in fact the government.

it is all wrong that a person who is going to be deemed worthy of the office should himself solicit it... for no one who is not ambitious would ask to hold office.

Virtue is a greater good than honour; and one might perhaps accordingly suppose that virtue rather than honour is the end of the political life.

All who have meditated upon the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depend upon the education of youth.

Human beings are by nature political animals

The student of politics must study the soul.

There is only one condition in which we can imagine managers not needing subordinates, and masters not needing slaves. This condition would be that each instrument could do its own work, at the word of command or by intelligent anticipation, like the statues of Daedalus or the tripods made by Hephaestus, of which Homer relates that Of their own motion they entered the conclave of Gods on Olympus, as if a shuttle should weave of itself, and a plectrum should do its own harp playing.

Correct habituation distinguishes a good political system from a bad one.

Aristotle states that only one thing could justify monarchy, and that was if the virtue of the king and his family were greater than the virtue of the rest of the citizens put together. Tactfully

Someone is a king only if he is self-sufficient and superior in all goods; and since such a person needs nothing more, he will consider the subjects' benefit, not his own. . . . Tyranny is contrary to this; for the tyrant pursues his own good.

What difference does it make whether the women rule or the rulers are ruled by the women?

Pero si estos funcionarios son pocos, la institución es oligárquica; y como los comisarios no pueden ser nunca muchos, la institución pertenece esencialmente a la oligarquía.

Com toda certeza, os antigos tiranos originaram-se dos demagogos.

For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary but also expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.