Quotes About Leadership

They leaned towards him, like flowers to the sun, drinking in his luster. It was as Odysseus had said: he had light enough to make heroes of them all.

Our men liked conquest; they did not trust a man who was conquered himself.

I wished Odysseus were there so I could ask him: but how did the king get that man to help him, the one who had struck him so deep? The answer that came to me was from a different tale. Long ago, in my wide bed, I had asked Odysseus: "What did you do? When you could not make Achilles and Agamemnon listen?" He'd smiled in the firelight. "That is easy. You make a plan in which they do not.

Success in such a war as this comes only through men sewn to a single purpose, funnelled to a single spear thrust rather than a thousand needle-pricks.

Odysseus drew the world to him," she said. "Telegonus runs after, shaping as he goes, like a river carving a channel.

Aristos Achaion." Best of the Greeks.

she was not ruled by appetites; she ruled with them instead.

You promise mercy to spies so they will spill their story, then you kill them after. You beat men who mutiny. You coax heroes from their sulks. You keep spirits high at any cost.

Each man or woman who passed, she knew their history and would tell it to me, for she said that you must understand people if you would rule them.

If they break through the wall, they will burn the ships—our only way of getting home, the only thing that makes us an army instead of refugees.

This, out of all of it, was perhaps the strangest: that he was their commander now. He would be expected to know them all, their names and armor and stories. He no longer belongs to me alone.

Every prince needs to know his lands, and there's no better way to learn than by grazing the goats.

Good management consist of showing average people how to do the work of superior people.

Rather than being a 'ship of state', Italy often seems more like a flotilla of boats, each piloted according to a different chart, each competing for access to the most favourable winds, yet each afraid of being isolated from the other craft.

The real power of effective leadership is maximizing other people's potential which inevitably demands also ensuring that they get the credit. When our ego won't let us build another person up, when everything has to build us up, then the effectiveness of the organization reverts to depending instead on how good we are in the technical aspects of what we do. And we have stopped leading and inspiring others to great heights.

Without a life example that speaks louder than words, even the most persuasive leader will fail.

What is distinctive and engaging about Jesus is not the novel things he says but the way he says things. He is creative not so much because he says things that are completely new but because he speaks with such authority.

Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.

Without debate, without criticism no administration and no country can succeed and no republic can survive.

If not us, who? If not now, when?

All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days . . .nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.

Those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside

Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past, let us accept our own responsibility for the future.