Quotes About Leadership

A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide—a moving, tightly reasoned discussion of America's lackluster response to genocide and the need for stronger global leadership in preventing mass atrocities.

The cynics may be the loudest voices, but I promise you, they will accomplish the least.

WHEN WOMEN SUCCEED, AMERICA SUCCEEDED

if Abbas had been a younger man, more intent on making his mark than protecting himself from criticism.

the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done. It was a pretty convincing

We did not come here to fear the future. We came here to shape it.

Leadership isn't just legislation, that it's a matter of persuading people and giving them confidence, and bringing them together and setting a tone.

I was the product of that young man's dreams; and as we pulled up to the makeshift holding area behind a wide stage, a part of me imagined myself not as the politician I had become but as one of those young people in the crowd, uncompromised by power, unencumbered by the need to accommodate men like Erdogan and Klaus, obliged only to make common cause with those chasing after a new and better world.

I remember looking at my calendar and realizing that over a span of a year and a half, I had taken exactly seven days off. The rest of the time I had typically worked twelve to sixteen hours a day.

In other words, FDR understood that to be effective, governance couldn't be so antiseptic that it set aside the basic stuff of politics: You had to sell your program, reward supporters, punch back against opponents, and amplify the facts that helped your cause while fudging the details that didn't.

The power to shape budgets and guide policy was what we needed, and that power lay elsewhere.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or time. We are the ones we've been waiting for change we seek.

The fuss of being president, the pomp, the press, the physical constraints—all that I could have done without. The actual work, though? The work, I loved. Even when it didn't love me back.

It's like moving-in day on a college campus, except a large percentage of the people involved are middle-aged, in suits, and, along with you, charged with running the most powerful nation on earth.

I grew comfortable enough [in the Oval Office] to put my feet up or sit on the desk ...

Goddamn it, Rahm, slow down—your ass is in my face!

The responsibility of tackling these problems didn't scare me. In fact, I relished the chance. But from everything I was learning, things were likely to get significantly worse before they got better.

America, I never said this journey would be easy, and I won't promise that now. Yes, our path is harder – but it leads to a better place. Yes our road is longer – but we travel it together. We don't turn back. We leave no one behind. We pull each other up. We draw strength from our victories, and we learn from our mistakes...

forty-two presidents.

Cooperate with the Obama administration at your own peril. And if you have to shake his hand, make sure you don't look happy about it.

My mother-in-law never complained about anything. Whenever I interacted with her, I'd remember that, no matter what kind of mess I was dealing with, no one had forced me to be the president and that I needed to just suck it up and do my job.

a president wasn't a lawyer or an accountant or a pilot, hired to carry out some narrow, specialized task. Mobilizing public opinion, shaping working coalitions—that was the job. Whether I liked it or not, people were moved by emotion, not facts. To elicit the best rather than the worst of those emotions, to buttress those better angels of our nature with reason and sound policy, to perform while still speaking the truth—that was the bar I needed to clear. —

Then suddenly a shot of my face flashed up on the TV screen and ABC News announced that I would be the forty-fourth president of the United States.

Maybe nothing would come of my Cairo speech. Maybe the dysfunction of the Middle East would play itself out regardless of what I did. Maybe the best we could hope for was to placate men like Mubarak and kill those who would try to kill us. Maybe, as the Pyramids had whispered, none of it mattered in the long run. But on the only scale that any of us can truly comprehend, the span of centuries, the actions of an American president sixty-five years earlier had set the world on a better course.