Quotes About Leadership

If you don't understand it right away, don't worry, you're in good company. Many fund managers and corporate CEOs had only a limited understanding of the bond and derivatives markets until very recently. Even President Clinton reportedly admitted surprise when he discovered the importance of—in his words, according to one source—a bunch of "fucking bond traders.

My attitude toward graduate students was different, I must say. I used graduate students as colleagues: I gave them the best problems to work on, and I encouraged them.

While F.D.R. once told Americans that we have nothing to fear but fear itself, Mr. Ashcroft is delighted to play the part of Fear Itself, an assignment in which he lets his imagination run riot.

Li wondered whether she should give the White House a call. Not that there was anything to report, but the President liked talking to her - he admired her intellect. That was the way things stood between them, and Li knew it, but she kept it to herself. It was better that way. She was one of only a handful of female American generals

But what if absolute consistency on any issue from the left or the right, religious or secular, is an indication of mediocre intelligence and a lack of intellectual honesty? What if the world is a complex place? What if leadership requires flexibility? What if ideology is a bad substitute for common sense? What if ideological consistency, let alone "purity," is a sign of small-mindedness, maybe even stupidity? Logically

I'd remember that if it came down to it, I'd rather be arrested for shoplifting than ever be an evangelical leader again. There was a certain basic and decent honesty about stealing pork chops that selling God had lacked.

And when it came to how Dad sometimes treated my mother, other L'Abri workers looked the other way. They must have heard the screaming, and some must have known there was abuse. They did nothing. And to the faithful, Dad was, in the words of Christianity Today magazine, "a great oak" of Christian leadership, something they called him when he died. That the great oak abused his wife was beside the point. Even

The paradox is that sometimes the less it makes sense, the better it works. And the less one knows about the "holy" people we follow, the better. One of the mysteries of human need is that religious leaders must become more than the sum of their fallible, sometimes awful, parts, because other people need them to be more. This does not make the religious leader a hypocrite; it just shows that the rest of us are desperate. So

evangelicalism is not not so much a religion as a series of fast-moving personality cults.

I felt a little like Custer must have felt when he chanced upon Sitting Bull's Sioux.

three years, John F. Kennedy enjoyed a relatively quiet presidency, with no major roadblocks. With Lyndon Baines. Johnson (LBJ) as a supposedly loyal Vice-President, JFK grew complacent.

Put two or three men in positions of conflicting authority. This will force them to work at loggerheads, allowing you to be the ultimate arbiter.

I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.

I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.

An election cannot give a country a firm sense of direction if it has two or more national parties which merely have different names, but are as alike in their principals and aims as two peas in the same pod.

I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.

I'm not the smartest fellow in the world, but I can sure pick smart colleagues.

War is young men dying and old men talking

Great power involves great responsibility

Organized money hates me--and I welcome their hatred!

There should be no bitterness or hate where the sole thought is the welfare of the United States of America. No man can occupy the office of President without realizing that he is President of all the people.

We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American Eagle in order to feather their own nests.

It is fun to be in the same decade with you. -Roosevelt to Churchill

It's a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead -- and to find no one there.