Quotes About Leadership

between our enlisted men and young officers and those of the Army. There appears to be no example of leadership in the latter organization. No pride and nothing to look up to. The truth is unknown. …

I'll quote Napoleon. He stated that the most important thing in military training is discipline. Without discipline an army becomes a mob.

All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great Master, Author, and Founder of society.

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

Who has but once dined his friends, has tasted what it is to be Caesar.

the only real owner of anything is its commander;

For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it.

And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young man, it's better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one.

Sing out and say something, my hearties. Roar and pull, my thunderbolts! Beach me, beach me on their black backs, boys; only do that for me, and I'll sign over to you my Martha's Vineyard plantation, boys; including wife and children, boys.

Be careful in the hunt, ye mates.

Quiqueg era como George Washington desarrollado a lo caníbal.

it's better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one.

Takže mladíku, musím tÄ› jednou provždy ujistit, že je lepÅ¡í plavit se pod kapitánem zasmuÅ¡ilým, ale dobrým, než usmÄ›vavým a Å¡patným.

With no perceptible trace of the vainglorious about him, rather with the offhand unaffectedness of natural regality, he seemed to accept the spontaneous homage of his shipmates.

Is it, thought Captain Delano, that this hapless man is one of those paper captains I've known, who by policy wink at what by power they cannot put down? I know no sadder sight than a commander who has little of command but the name.

Willie experienced the strange sensations of the first days of a new captain: a shrinking of his personal identiy, and a stretching out of his nerve ends to all the spaces and machinery of the ship. He was less free than before. He developed the apprehensive listening ears of a young mother; the ears listened on in his sleep; he never quite slept, not the way he had before.

no man who rises to command of a United States naval ship can possibly be a coward. And

Of course the Russians under Zhukov were

It's a great mistake to think dictators are all-powerful! They're hobbled by their paper shufflers, like all politicians. More so, in a way.

We transferred to Queeg the hatred we should have felt for Hitler and the Japs who

Now I'm not a Nazi, I've never said the Führer is a thousand percent right. But he's a winner, damn it all. He gets things done, like Roosevelt. And you want us to get rid of him?

But whatever the civilian structure, let our people hereafter entrust military affairs to its trained generals, and insist that politicians keep hands off the war machine.

Pug thought, that in a trivial way was like the President's. Some people had it, some didn't. He himself had none of it. In the Navy the quality was not overly admired. The name for it was "grease." Men who possessed it had a way of climbing fast; they also had a way of relying upon it, till they got too greasy and slipped.

By keeping back the twenty-five squadrons from the lost Battle of France, he acted toughly, wisely, and ungallantly; and he turned the war to the course that ended five long years later, when Hitler killed himself and Nazi Germany fell apart. This deed put Winston Churchill in the company of the rare saviors of countries, and perhaps of civilizations.