Quotes About Leadership

The claim of the Church to spiritual leadership could never be made wholly credible to all its communicants when it was founded in material wealth. The more riches the Church amassed, the more visible and disturbing became the flaw; nor could it ever be resolved, but continued to renew doubt and dissent in every century.

A minister's (cabinet member's) function was not to DO the work but to see that it got done.

When he smelled battle afar off, Winston Churchill resembled the war horse in Job who turned not back from the sword, but 'paweth in the valley and saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha.' He was the only British minister to have a perfectly clear conviction of what Britain should do and to act upon it without hesitation.

Give me an army of three active corps and I will agree to become Governor of Paris; on this condition, formal and explicit, you can count on me for its defense." Messimy thanked him so effusively, "shaking my hands several times and even kissing me," that Gallieni felt assured "from the warmth of these demonstrations that the place I was succeeding to was not an enviable one.

That he survived, and indeed returned to government, was one of man's occasional triumphs over medicine.

Joffre was adept at taking advice, and submitted more or less consciously to the reigning doctrinaires of the Operations Bureau. They formed what a French military critic called "a church outside which there was no salvation and which could never pardon those who revealed the falsity of its doctrine.

That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages. The claim of the Church to spiritual leadership could never be made wholly credible to all its communicants when it was founded in material wealth. The more riches the Church amassed, the more visible and disturbing became the flaw; nor could it ever be resolved, but continued to renew doubt and dissent in every century.

Cornwallis was a man who could have thrust his hand in a flame if necessary, but not a man to organize the logistics and arrangements of a large campaign with a likely risk of failure. The smooth face in the Gainsborough portrait with no lines of thought or of frowns or of laughter—with no lines at all—tells as much. It is a face composed by a life of comfort and satisfaction without any need of desperate attempts. As

Nevertheless Sir John French next day sent Joffre definitive notice that the British Army would not be in condition to take its place in the line "for another ten days." Had he asked for ten days' time out when fighting with his back to London he would not have survived in command. As it was, Sir John French remained Commander in Chief for another year and a half.

The Prime Minister was not the only person unconcerned with odds and ends of this kind. When a German official, foreseeing the change to a long war of attrition, presented Moltke with a memorandum on the need for an Economic General Staff, Moltke replied, "Don't bother me with economics—I am busy conducting a war.

Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip, and Germans, no less than other peoples, prepare for the last war.

Why, since folly or perversity is expected of individuals, should we expect anything else from government?

Connection" was the cement of the governing class.

Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on [office]," he wrote to a friend, "a rottenness begins in his conduct.

Lanrezac's sin was in having been right, all too vocally. He had been right from the beginning about the fatal underestimation of the German right wing as a result of which a fair part of France was now under the German boot. His decision to break off battle at Charleroi when threatened with double envelopment by Bülow's and Hausen's armies had saved the French left wing.

princes are instituted by God not to seek their own gain but the common good of the people.

Planted firmly across the path of change, operating warily, shrewdly yet with passionate conviction in defence of the existing order, was a peer who was Chancellor of Oxford University for life, had twice held the India Office, twice the Foreign Office and was now Prime Minister for the third time. He was Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, Lord Salisbury, ninth Earl and third Marquess of his line.

Meeting his commissariat staff for the first time as Commander in Chief, the Grand Duke said to them, "Gentlemen, no stealing.

the power to command frequently causes failure to think;

If I were a king, the mischief would be much greater; for I should ruin not only myself, but my subjects.

Do you ask, then, what will educate your son? Your example will educate him.

You don't keep a dog and bark yourself.

Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war, With the cross of Jesus going on before. Christ, the royal Master, leads against the foe; Forward into battle see His banners go!

In the family, from the first, the idea of authority has appeared. Protection and order are requisites of the family; and these cannot exist without recognition of an authority.