Quotes About Leadership

For a country to have a great writer is to have another government.

In the long run every government is the exact symbol of its people, with their wisdom and unwisdom.

How can you govern a country with two hundred and forty-six varieties of cheese?

There is but one way for a president to deal with the Congress, and that is continuously, incessantly, and without interruption. If it's really going to work, the relationship between the president and the Congress has got to be almost incestuous.

All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet.

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

He (Winston Churchill) mobilized the English language and sent it into battle to steady his fellow countrymen. . . .

Only great men may have great faults.

Great men too often have greater faults than little men can find room for.

If I am a great man, then a good many of the great men of history are frauds.

No man ever yet became great by imitation.

It is the prerogative of great men only to have great defects.

You can stand tall without standing on someone. You can be a victor without having victims.

Hire the best. Pay them fairly. Communicate frequently. Provide challenges and rewards. Believe in them. Get out of their way and they'll knock your socks off.

It is not who you attend school with but who controls the school you attend.

No matter how lofty you are in your department, the responsibility for what your lowliest assistant is doing is yours.

I am convinced that any feeling of exaltation because we have people under us should be conquered, for I am sure that if we enjoy being over people, there will be something in our manner which will make them dislike being under us.

Let our girls feel that we expect something more of them than that they merely look pretty and appear well in society. Teach them that there is a race with special needs which they and only they can help; that the world needs and is already asking for their trained and efficient forces.

The manager cannot share his power with division superintendent or foreman or workman, but he can give them opportunities for developing their power.

Hero-worship exists, has existed, and will forever exist, universally among mankind.

An efficiency-regime cannot be run without a few heroes stuck about it to carry off the dullness - much as plums have to be put into a bad pudding to make it palatable.

History is simply a piece of paper covered with print; the main thing is still to make history, not to write it.

Most history is a record of the triumphs, disasters and follies of top people. The black hole in it is the way of life of mute, inglorious men and women who made no nuisance of themselves in the world.

It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why history is so attractive to the more timid among us.