Quotes About Leadership

Your Highness, what do you call it when a high-ranking person lies right in your face?" the President asked with a wry smile. "Diplomacy.

A commander's pride got his soldiers dead.

The pinnacle of power in China is the nine-member Politburo Standing Committee, the tiny body that sets policy for the nation's 1.4 billion citizens.

thing, most deadly of all to those who hold it in their earthly hands. For yourself, you must decide. What sort of leader do you wish to be, and with what other leaders

A Guards regiment, eh, Comrade Colonel? These tit-sucking children could not guard a Turkish whorehouse; much less do anything worthwhile inside of it!" While commenting on how unprepared his troops are. -Alekseyev

I remember when Deng said, 'It doesn't matter if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.' To which Mao responded with a livid snarl: 'What emperor said that?

how could a man lead without vision?

He had to grow his own NCOs.

First we must accomplish the task at hand. An officer who looks too far ahead stumbles over his own boots.

History admires the wise, but it elevates the brave. —EDMUND MORRIS

It was so strange, how much fear there was in the world, and the most fearful of all were so often those who held the power in their hands.

He was master of all he surveyed. At least that was the phrase that came to mind, and with all such aphorisms it could be both true and false at the same time.

When the Air Force nearly collapsed in the 1970s, he was one of the men who saved it, and rebuilt it in the 1980s, not just fixing the broken parts, but defining what an air force is supposed to be.

The new system created by Goldwater-Nichols was not universally popular in the Pentagon, but the people in the field loved it.

no one rose to exceptional greatness exclusively by being "a good soldier.

Muy bien, jefe

can't take him up there for a short haircut." Hallston smiled coldly. "I doubt anyone

A" would go out to everybody, while "B" would go only to those people who were supposed to survive, people who understood what it was all about, or who would accept their survival and get on with things with the rest of the crew.

The poetics of politics had to be observed.

Ryan was a tough, formidable son of a bitch who met things head-on when he had to. That's his weakness, Wellington told himself. He prefers to meet things head-on. He lacks subtlety. It was a common failing of the honest, and a grievous weakness in a political environment.

You are never satisfied, Comrade Captain. I suppose it is men like you who force progress upon us all.

Money won't solve our problems. Globalization won't solve our problems. Neither will democracy. In fact, democracy comes with a built-in trapdoor: the bad guy can get elected.

the job was invented in order to make things easier for those at the top.

If your CEO has enough good ideas to fuel the company's growth objectives in perpetuity, maybe you don't need to tap into the reservoir of talent at other levels of the organization. But the most innovative companies in the twenty-first century have transitioned from command-and-control organizations to a participatory approach that involves collaboration and teamwork.