Quotes About Leadership

In Judges, Gideon asks God how to choose his men for battle. The Lord told Gideon to take his men down to the river and drink. The men who flopped down on their bellies and drank like dogs were no good to him. Gideon watched as some of his men knelt down and drank with their heads watching the horizon, spears in hand. Though they were few, they were the men he needed. You've always been one of the few, James. Keep watching the horizon.

Mo had been the one Iraqi commander who stood head and shoulders above his peers. He excelled in both the planning and tactical execution of direct-action missions, spoke English almost fluently, and had the trust of both his men and the senior leadership of the MOI.

Mr. Donovan, I have been in this chair for over thirty years.

This was the problem with making important decisions by committee and trying to run a war of ideals with men and women whose vision was so limited by money.

Generals always fight the last war

Cortés proved the shrewder of the two. As he did with the Aztecs, he did with his Castilian rival: he defeated Narváez's larger force with a smaller one.

the qualities that led the top Nazis to commit and tolerate acts of horror existed in many people, living in many places.

Naturally, I am the leader, so it is my problem to see that each of us contributes his share'.

Henry Miller once wrote: "No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance."3

Give a woman a job and she grows balls.

Her majesty is in fact Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, Grenada, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Belize, Antigua and Barbuda, and Saint Kitts and Nevis.

Theodore Roosevelt (after whom the Teddy Bear

and continued to lead his men; as you would imagine, his demonstration

soldiers made up an amazing ten per cent of the army's troops, the high command accepted they were wrong to

Well, let's put it this way, you'll be a major by nightfall or dead

We need leaders of conviction who have diverse constituencies always in mind, who carefully consider the larger contexts of their words and deeds. We need people who aren't afraid to stand for what they believe in, but who also recognize the privilege of their position. We need leaders who hold themselves accountable to their peers – leaders of great fortitude and great integrity.

Councils of war breed timidity and defeatism.

There are no limits to our future if we don't put limits on our people.

Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.

A good commander can beat the odds. A great commander can beat the gods.

Ideas can never be traced to any one source. They are tossed back and forth between people until the decision makers step in and choose what they think is a success formula.

H. L. Mencken, a journalist in the 1920s, saw this whipping-up of fear as endemic to politics. "The whole aim of politics is to keep the populace alarmed—and hence clamorous to be led to safety—by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, almost all of them imaginary.

The whole aim of politics is to keep the populace alarmed—and hence clamorous to be led to safety—by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, almost all of them imaginary

Power without the wisdom to use it properly was a very good definition of evil,