Quotes About Leadership

I command, or I keep quiet." Napoleon

Command, deprived of personal judgment, can win no battles.

William McKinley was a man made to be managed.

Folly is a child of power.

Even his own speeches bored him.

if autocrats always acted wisely they would not furnish history with moral lessons.

Let us retreat when we can, not when we must. Lord Chatham

It is a feature of government that the more important the problem, the further it tends to be removed from handling by anyone well acquainted with the subject.

Between the happening of a historical process and its recognition by rulers, a lag stretches, full of pitfalls.

Within the army, field officers despised Staff officers as "having the brains of canaries and the manners of Potsdam," but both groups were as one in their distaste for interference by civilian ministers who were known as "the frocks." The civil arm in its turn referred to the military as "the boneheads.

Officers succumbed to the spirit of conspirators.

The risk of leaving East Prussia, hearth of Junkerdom and the Hohenzollerns, to be held by only nine divisions was hard to accept, but Frederick the Great had said, "It is better to lose a province than split the forces with which one seeks victory," and nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.

His solution, beautiful and unattainable, was philosopher-kings.

To understand the popes we must look at the princes.

Policy was not reconsidered because the governing group had no habit of purposeful consultation.

When those who have the title of shepherd play the part of wolves," said Lothar of Saxony, "heresy grows in the garden of the Church.

government, in the words of one of the group, J. K. Galbraith, was rarely more than a choice between "the disastrous and the unpalatable.

Washington's incessant need for NEW assessments testifies to uncertainty in the capital.

I need no Chief," said the Kaiser; "I can do this for myself.

The hypothetical has its charm, but actual government is history.

yet he represented that emotional choice a people makes to satisfy its craving for a leader.

The art of oratory was considered part of the equipment of a statesman.

The author says one patrician English leader saw his relationship with the populace thusly: He wasn't responsible TO them. He was responsible FOR them. He was responsible for their care.

He believed that rank without power was a sham.