quotations about leadership
Because our desire for a coherent vision of the world is bottomless, our hunger for leadership is insatiable, too. Leaders make the world more sensible, but never sensible enough.
JOSHUA ROTHMAN
"Shut Up and Sit Down", The New Yorker, February 29, 2016
The right man comes at the right time.
ITALIAN PROVERB
When the shepherd is a wolf, the flock becomes only so much meat.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVEN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Corrino
The greatest leaders mobilize others by coalescing people around a shared vision.
KEN BLANCHARD
Leading at a Higher Level
He who has never learned to obey cannot be a good commander.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.
WALTER LIPPMANN
The Essential Lippmann
Leadership in today's world requires far more than a large stock of gunboats and a hard fist at the conference table.
HUBERT H. HUMPHREY
speech in Gainesville, Florida, Oct. 20, 1966
That's what leadership is all about, identifying quality people, giving them the opportunity and experience to create and develop to continue to make the company successful. The best leaders identify and mentor potential leaders. A leader's most important legacy is the leaders he or she develops.
KENNETH E. STRONG & JOHN A. DICICCO
Leadership Is a Choice
The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.
WALTER LIPPMANN
The Essential Lippmann
Leadership is a matter of performance not position. The person who sets a good example in your office is a leader. So is the father who proudly watches his daughter sell Girl Scout cookies in their neighborhood, and the teenager who holds the door open for you in the grocery store, even though his friends are snickering in the background. The best leaders help you move from where you are to where you need to be. Most important, they realize and cultivate the potential in others to be a positive influence regardless of their position.
RANDY PENNINGTON
"Leadership Choices for a Positive Future", Huffington Post, April 26, 2016
He who thinketh he leadeth and hath no one following him is only taking a walk.
JOHN C. MAXWELL
Leading from the Lockers
What I want is men who will support me when I am in the wrong.
LORD MELBOURNE
attributed, Lord M.
The best leaders turn their followers into leaders, realizing that the journey ahead requires many guides.
JAMES M. KOUZES & BARRY Z. POSNER
A Leader's Legacy
Good leadership is largely invisible.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Harkonnen
You know you're a good leader when people follow you out of curiosity.
COLIN POWELL
"10 Leadership Tenets from Colin Powell", Stanford Graduate School of Business
A cowardly leader is the most dangerous of men.
STEPHEN KING
Under the Dome
Once you've given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.
FRANK HERBERT
Dune
True leadership cannot be awarded, appointed, or assigned. It comes only from influence, and that can't be mandated. It must be earned. The only thing a title can buy is a little time -- either to increase your level of influence with others or to erase it.
JOHN C. MAXWELL
The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership
The most important quality in a leader is that of being acknowledged as such.
ANDRE MAUROIS
"The Art of Leadership", The Art of Living
Those who are successfully to lead their fellow-men, should have once possessed the nobler feelings. We have all known individuals whose magnanimity was not likely to be troublesome on any occasion; but then they betrayed their own interests by unwisely omitting the consideration, that such feelings might exist in the breasts of those whom they had to guide and govern: for they themselves cannot even remember the time when in their eyes justice appeared preferable to expediency, the happiness of others to self-interest, or the welfare of a State to the advancement of a party.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd