Quotes About Leadership

New methods of accessing and communicating information unite regions as never before and project events globally—but in a manner that inhibits reflection, demanding of leaders that they register instantaneous reactions in a form expressible in slogans. Are we facing a period in which forces beyond the restraints of any order determine the future?

In any of these evolutions, India will be a fulcrum of twenty-first-century order: an indispensable element, based on its geography, resources, and tradition of sophisticated leadership, in the strategic and ideological evolution of the regions and the concepts of order at whose intersection it stands.

If the gap between the qualities required for election and those essential for the conduct of office becomes too wide, the conceptual grasp and sense of history that should be part of foreign policy may be lost—or else the cultivation of these qualities may take so much of a president's first term in office as to inhibit a leading role for the United States.

The highest form of warfare Is to attack [the enemy's] Strategy itself; The next, To attack [his] Alliances. The next, To attack Armies;

Konrad Adenauer became Chancellor of the new Federal Republic of Germany at the age of seventy-three, an age by which Bismarck's career was nearing its end.

At least Tsar Alexander III understood that the game now being played was for the highest stakes. When Giers asked him, '...what would we gain by helping the french destroy Germany?' he replied: 'what we would gain would be that Germany, as such, would disappear. It would break up into a number of small, weak states, the way it used to be'.

Mao thought he was inscrutable you know. At least I think he did. it was hard to tell with him.

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

Moreover, events often move too quickly to allow for precise calculation; leaders have to make judgments based on intuitions and hypotheses that cannot be proven at the time of decision. Management of risk is as critical to the leader as analytical skill.

Statesmen are not called upon only to settle easy questions. These often settle themselves. It is where the balance quivers, and the proportions are veiled in mist, that the opportunity for world-saving decisions presents itself.

As Charles de Gaulle observed in his meditation on leadership, The Edge of the Sword (1932), the artist 'does not renounce the use of his intelligence' – which is, after all, the source of 'lessons, methods, and knowledge'. Instead, the artist adds to these foundations 'a certain instinctive faculty which we call inspiration', which alone can provide the 'direct contact with nature from which the vital spark must leap'.

when Germany declared itself ready to discuss an armistice, Wilson refused to negotiate until the Kaiser abdicated.

The essence of building a constructive world order is that no single country, neither China nor the United States, is in a position to fill by itself the world leadership role of the sort that the United States occupied in the immediate post–Cold War period, when it was materially and psychologically preeminent.

Well, you can just stop and think of what could happen if anybody with a decent system of government got control of that mainland. Good God.… There'd be no power in the world that could even—I mean, you put 800 million Chinese to work under a decent system… and they will be the leaders of the world.34

framework of order to keep the peace. Order and freedom, sometimes described as opposite poles on the spectrum of experience, should instead be understood as interdependent. Can today's leaders rise above the urgency of day-to-day events to achieve this balance?

the convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in office. There is little time for leaders to reflect. They are locked in an endless battle in which the urgent constantly gains on the important. The public life of every political figure is a continual struggle to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstance. When

The mindset for walking lonely political paths may not be self-evident to those who seek confirmation by hundreds, sometimes thousands of friends on Facebook.

A great president must be an educator, bridging the gap between his people's future and its experience

The ability to enable people to gather in a square differs from building new institutions of state.

Em período de convulsões generalizadas, um país onde seja preservada a autoridade doméstica fica em boa posição para explorar o caos dos Estados vizinhos em benefício de objetivos internacionais mais elevados.

China as the present-day economic superpower is the legacy of Deng Xiaoping.

The leaders on both sides of the Pacific have an obligation to establish a tradition of consultation and mutual respect so that, for their successors, jointly building a shared world order becomes an expression of parallel national aspirations.

la dependencia de la coerción es síntoma de un liderazgo inadecuado

the PAP's first nine years in power, Lee set aside nearly one-third of Singapore's budget for education Ã¢â'¬â€œ an astonishing proportion in relation to neighboring countries, or indeed any country in the world.[59]