Quotes About Leadership

Not only does a good army commander not need any special qualities, on the contrary he needs the absence of the highest and best human attributes—love, poetry, tenderness, and philosophic inquiring doubt. He should be limited, firmly convinced that what he is doing is very important (otherwise he will not have sufficient patience), and only then will he be a brave leader. God forbid that he should be humane, should love, or pity, or think of what is just and unjust.

And everybody was undermining everybody else mainly over the course of the war, which all these men thought they were in control of, though in practice the war ignored them and went its own inevitable way. In

Weyrother evidently felt himself to be at the head of a movement that had already become unrestrainable. He was like a horse running downhill harnessed to a heavy cart. Whether he was pulling it or being pushed by it he did not know, but rushed along at headlong speed with no time to consider what this movement might lead to.

Kutuzov looked at him with eyes wide with dismay, and then took off his cap and crossed himself. 'God rest his soul! May the Lord's will be done with all of us!' He sighed deeply and was silent. 'I loved and respected him, and I sympathize with you with all my heart.' He embraced

That's how it's always done with us, all the wrong way round!' the Russian officers and generals said after the battle of Tarutino, just as people speak now, letting it be felt that some fool somewhere does things that way, the wrong way round, but we would not do things that way. But people who talk like that either do not know what they are talking about or are deliberately deceiving themselves.

They could not understand the self denial of our emperor, who wants nothing for himself and everything for the good of the world.

In the organism of states such men are necessary, as wolves are necessary in the organism of nature, and they always exist, always appear and hold their own, however incongruous their presence and their proximity to the head of the government may be.

every time conquerors appear there have been wars, but this does not prove that the conquerors caused the wars and that it is possible to find the laws of a war in the personal activity of a single man

But a commander in chief, especially at a difficult moment, has always before him not one proposal but dozens simultaneously. And all these proposals, based on strategics and tactics,

But every time there have been conquests there have been conquerors; every time there has been a revolution in any state there have been great men,

the winning of battles does not necessarily lead to conquest,

To us it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other either because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England's policy was astute or the Duke of Oldenburg wronged. We cannot grasp what connection such circumstances have with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe killed and ruined the people of Smolensk and Moscow and were killed by them.

Since God has given us the papacy, let us enjoy it.

At best, most college presidents are running something that is somewhere between a faltering corporation and a hotel.

A country cannot live in disorder, incompetence, irresponsibility, uncertainty, and corruption.

In the human desert, where there are so many lambs, be lions!

En el desierto de la incertidumbre humana, donde existen tantos corderos; ¡ustedes sean leones!

Today, I think the attitude is that governing is not necessarily good politics, and the result is that it's much more partisan and much more divided.

There is a limit to the application of democratic methods. You can inquire of all the passengers as to what type of car they like to ride in, but it is impossible to question them as to whether to apply the brakes when the train is at full speed and accident threatens.

Lincoln's significance lies in his not hesitating before the most severe means, once they were found to be necessary, in achieving a great historic aim posed by the development of a young nation.

cult? When I was declining the commissariat of home

Every mass action, regardless of its immediate aim, is a warning addressed to the leadership. This warning is at first mild in character, but becomes more and more resolute. By July it had become a threat. In October we have the final act.

Finally, one of the most recent leaders of the left wing of the Social Revolutionaries, Mstislavsky, who subsequently went over to the Bolsheviks, says of the February uprising: "The revolution caught us, the party people of those days, like the foolish virgins of the Bible, napping." It does not matter how much they resembled virgins, but it is true they were all fast asleep.

I would like to be a positive force for young girls.