Quotes about leadership

In essence, leaders are people who "walk ahead," people genuinely committed to deep changes, in themselves and in their organizations.

No, Your Majesty, I do not like kings, but I do like a man be­hind a king when I find him.

Great leaders are formed only by taking on great challenges.

“She’s such a bitch,” Tina says, which I find a little contradictory, but overall quite true. “She’s got to be in charge of everything.”

I sit next to her. “Well, I guess. But in business, that’s leadership.”

Tina stares at me for a second. “I can’t believe you consider that a positive trait. How about her inability to accept other points of view? Is it good leadership to be narrow, too?”

“Focus,” I say. “They call that focus.”

Tina stares at me. “Her paranoia?”

“Business savvy.”

“Compulsive need to have everything just how she wants it?”

“Organizational skills.”

“Aggressiveness?”

“Aggressiveness,” I say, “is already a good thing.”

“Jesus Christ,” Tina says, her eyebrow ring glinting in the morning sun. “Sometimes I worry about this country.”

"You leave me without hope," Brys said.

"I am sorry for that. Do not seek to find hope among your leaders. They are the repositories of poison. Their interest in you extends only so far as their ability to control you. For you, they seek duty and obedience, and they will ply you with the language of stirring faith. They seek followers, and woe to those who question, or voice challenge."

"The man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap."

The more physical the activity, the less the difficulties will be. The more the activity becomes intellectual and turns into motives which exercise a determining influence on the commander's will, the more the difficulties will increase.

The urge to excel and the urge to lead aren’t the same. Sometimes I think they may be opposites.

So it is with all the great leaders: the commodity they have to sell is personality. Mere ideas can be left to lesser men.

“You’ve behaved very highhandedly, Captain Mallory. Is that the custom out here?”

“The custom is, sir, that those who know a situation handle it and those who don’t watch and learn, or get out of the way.”

We need no chieftain; such folk eat more than their share.

He that is to govern a whole Nation, must read in himself, not this, or that particular man; but Mankind; which though it be hard to do, harder than to learn any Language, or Science; yet, when I shall have set down my own reading orderly, and perspicuously, the pains left another, will be only to consider, if he also find not the same in himself. For this kind of Doctrine, admitteth no other Demonstration.