Quotes About Leadership

President George W. Bush, who believes he is an instrument of God and characterizes international relations as a biblical clash between forces of good and evil.

Jackson lead as he lived, sometimes with his heart, sometimes with his mind, sometimes with both.

For Jefferson, politics was not a dispiriting distraction but an undertaking that made everything else possible.

A politician's task was to bring reality and policy into the greatest possible account with the ideal and the principled.

Not all great presidents were always good, and neither individuals nor nations are without evil.

The best political figures create the impression that they find everyone they encounter to be what Abigail Adams said Jefferson was: "one of the choice ones of the earth.

In the closed circle of the war cabinet, pounded by terrible report after terrible report, there had been uncertainty about whether he could fend off the drift to exploring a deal with Hitler. The determination of the larger group trumped the tentativeness of the smaller, and Churchill fulfilled his role as leader by disentangling himself from defeatism--one of his singular achievements at the end of May 1940.

You have to appeal to people's best instincts, not their worst ones. You may win an election or so by doing the other, but it does a lot of harm to the country.

Politics was at once clinical and human, driven by principles and passions that he (the leader) had to master and harness for the good of the whole.

All our great Presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.

A president sets a tone for the nation and helps tailor habits of heart and of mind.

If sufficiently developed and organized, public sentiment, as manifested in Congress, can prevail over presidential intransigence. Lincoln

My belief was that it was not only his right but his duty to do anything that the needs of the Nation demanded unless such action was forbidden by the Constitution or by the laws.

The demands of exercising it once it is won, however, are so complex and fluid that ideological certitude is often among the first casualties of actual governing.

As a rule, politicians tend to remember the things they wish to emulate or the things they hope to avoid.

Dignified theatricality is an essential element of power.

Well," Bush answered, "I'm worried that sometimes your idealism will get in the way of what I think is sound governance.

Politicians, singers, and preachers are in the same business, using sound to move hearts and change minds.

Americans tend to prefer their presidents on horseback: heroes who dream big and sound trumpets. There is, however, another kind of leader – quieter and less glamorous but no less significant – whose virtues repay our attention. There is greatness in political lives dedicated more to steadiness than to boldness, more to reform than to revolution, more to management of complexity than to the making of mass movements.

A politician's task was to bring reality and policy into the greatest possible accord with the ideal and the principled.

We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That's what we believed in, that's why we voted for Donald Trump. Because he said he's going to take our country back. And that's what we gotta do.

Therein lies a lesson: If sufficiently developed and organized, public sentiment, as manifested in Congress, can prevail over presidential intransigence. Lincoln offered a case study in the leadership of hope and progress; Andrew Johnson's is an unhappier story of willfulness and single-minded service to a favored constituency—in this case, to white Southerners.

He was seeking the presidency of a country riven not only by competing interests but by incompatible understandings of reality.

The presidency which under Lincoln had been a tool of transformation had become, under Johnson, a refuge from modernity.