Quotes About Influence

power without purpose and without vision was not the same thing as leadership.

persuaded editors and publishers at a dozen leading

If I am ever to be remembered," Johnson wistfully told me, "it will be for civil rights.

The bullet that rests in Roosevelt's chest has killed Wilson for the Presidency," one Democratic speaker suspected.

Fearing that Taft would be too reticent on the stump, Roosevelt barraged him with incessant advice. "Do not answer Bryan; attack him!" he counseled in early September, adding, "Don't let him make the issues.

So surely did Lincoln midwife this process of social transformation that we look back at the United States before Abraham Lincoln and after him.

The story of Theodore Roosevelt," one biographer has suggested, "is the story of a small boy who read about great men and decided he wanted to be like them.

If he (Teddy Roosevelt) lacked Will Taft's immediate charisma, gradually his classmates could not resist the spell of his highly original personality.

Assume full responsibility for a pivotal decision.

Roosevelt's leadership style was, in actuality, governed by just such a series of simple dictums and aphorisms: Hit the ground running; consolidate control; ask questions of everyone wherever you go; manage by wandering around; determine the basic problems of each organization and hit them head-on; when attacked, counterattack; stick to your guns; spend your political capital to reach your goals; and then when your work is stymied or done, find a way out.

I'm giving my whole life to breaking the butterfly of a John Rockefeller upon the wheel of my ponderous articles

Do leaders shape the times or do the times summon their leaders?

national press. He called them by their first names, invited them

He sought the knowledge—not easily accessible—of who had the power of decision over the particular matter in question, and, the source of authority identified, by what means influence could be exerted. This

Assemblyman Isaac Hunt, who later became a close friend, would never forget the first time he saw Roosevelt. "He came in as if he had been ejected by a catapult," Hunt recalled.

How children dance," Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, "to the unlived lives of their parents

Regardless of one's impressive title, power without purpose and without vision was not the same thing as leadership.

Lyndon was his father's shadow and replica.

It's a bully speech," encouraged Roosevelt in reply.

all relations of power rest on one thing, a contract between the leader and the followers such that the followers believe it is in their interest to follow the leader. No man can compel another—except at knifepoint—to do what he does not want to do."17

It may be that 'the voice of the people is the voice of God' in fifty one cases out of a hundred; but in the remaining forty nine it is quite as likely to be the voice of the devil, or, what is still worse, the voice of a fool.

beneath Lincoln's tenderness and kindness, he was without question the most complex, ambitious, willful, and implacable leader of them all.

I made the discovery long ago that very few people made a great difference to me, but that those few mattered enormously. I live surrounded by people, and my thoughts are always with the few that matter whether they are near or far.

War...strengthened the position of the armament industries...to a point...that these industries dominated the economies and therefore the governments of all the participating nations...war barbarised and lowered the already very low level of accepted conduct.