Quotes About Leadership

The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.

One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

The measure of a man is what he does with power.

Those who tell the stories rule society.

In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill... we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.

The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government is to live under the government of worse men.

A sus veintisiete añitos, sin la menor experiencia laboral -no digamos empresarial o administrativa-. puesto que no había trabajado un minuto de su vida, Castro 'sabe' cómo resolver en un abrir y cerrar de ojos el problema de la vivienda, de la salud, de la industrialización, de la instantánea creación de riquezas.

Nicolás Maduro empieza a padecer un delirio no exento de lapsus cómicos cada vez que se acerca el micrófono a la boca

The master's eye is the best fertilizer.

Nothing is harder to direct than a man in prosperity; nothing more easily managed that one is adversity.

Spintharus, speaking in commendation of Epaminondas, says he scarce ever met with any man who knew more and spoke less.

He made the city [Athens], great as it was when he took it, the greatest and richest of all cities, and grew to be superior in power to kings and tyrants. Some of these actually appointed him guardian of their sons, but he did not make his estate a single drachma greater than it was when his father left it to him.

When asked by a woman from Attica:'Why are you Spartan women the only ones who can rule men?', she said: 'Because we are the only ones who give birth to men.

It was] better to set up a monarchy themselves than to suffer a sedition to continue that must certainly end in one.

Being consulted again whether it were requisite to enclose the city with a wall, [Lycurgus] sent them word, 'The city is well fortified which hath a wall of men instead of brick'.

That which is chiefly the office of a general, to force the enemy into fighting when he finds himself the stronger, and to avoid being driven into it himself when he is the weaker...

Thus ambitious spirits in a commonwealth, when they transgress their bounds, are apt to do more harm than good.

For kings indeed we have, who wear the marks and assume the titles of royalty, but as for the qualities of their minds, they have nothing by which they are to be distinguished from their subjects.

So they cut their hair short in front, that their enemies might not grasp it. And they say that Alexander of Macedon for the same reason ordered his generals to have the beards of the Macedonians shaved, because they were a convenient handle for the enemy to grasp.

It was glorious to acquire a throne by justice, yet more glorious to prefer justice before a throne; the same virtue which made the one appear worthy of regal power exalted the other to the disregard of it.

For first, when Pompey made severe laws for punishing and laying great fines on those who had corrupted the people with gifts, Cato advised him to let alone what was already passed, and to provide for the future; for if he should look up past misdemeanors, it would be difficult to know where to stop; and if he would ordain new penalties, it would be unreasonable to punish men by a law, which at that time they had not the opportunity of breaking.

This vexed Theseus, and determining not to hold aloof, but to share the fortunes of the people, he came forward and offered himself without being drawn by lot. The people all admired his courage and patriotism, and Aegeus finding that his prayers and entreaties had no effect on his unalterable resolution, proceeded to choose the rest by lot.

In a harangue to the people, he said, with reference to these measures, that he had proscribed all he could think of, and as to those who now escaped his memory, he would proscribe them at some future time.

Leaders who allow themselves to be governed by reason will allow themselves to in turn govern their cities benevolently. The uneducated leader, on the other hand, is plagued by greed, paranoia, and a false sense of grandeur.