Leader Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The most effective leaders of companies in transition are the quiet, unassuming people whose inner wiring is such that the worst circumstances bring out their best. They're unflappable, they're ready to die if they have to. But you can trust that, when bad things are happening, they will become clearheaded and focused.

James C. Collins

Something that's bigger than you, and something that's kind and forgiving, I'd heard one of the meeting leaders say. That's all your Higher Power has to be.

Jennifer Weiner

This is a very crucial period and we have got five fantastic candidates. All of them would make excellent leaders of the Party.

They are volunteers: last of the great volunteer armies, for the draft is beginning that summer in the North. They have lost faith in their leaders but not in themselves.

Times of upheaval require not just more leadership but more leaders. People at all organizational levels, whether anointed or self-appointed, must be empowered to share leadership responsibilities.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter

In my generation, this was not the first occasion when the strong had attacked the weak.Communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese had acted ten, fifteen, and twenty years earlier. I felt certain that if South Korea was allowed to fall, Communist leaders would be emboldened to override nations closer to our own shores.

Harry S. Truman

I work for the United Nations. I go to places where enormous upheaval and pain and anguish exist. And a lot of it exists based upon American policy. Whom we support, whom we support as heads of state, what countries we've helped to overthrow, what leaders we've helped to diminish because they did not fit the mold we think they should fit, no matter how ill advised that thought may be.

Harry Belafonte

Do you expect me, after all my history as a militant and as one of the Iraqi leaders, to go to an American prison – to go to Guantanamo? I would rather die.

Before the Invasion of Iraq

In contrast to the asexual chasteness of official communist art, Nazi art is both prurient and idealizing. A utopian aesthetics (physical perfection; identity as a biological given) implies an ideal eroticism: sexuality converted into the magnetism of leaders and the joy of followers. The fascist ideal is to transform sexual energy into a "spiritual" force, for the benefit of the community.

Anyone who dares that nation gets a befitting reply. People across the world learn from Israel the art of doing agricultural and vegetable farming. On the contrary, India has 5,000 km land, population in crores, powerful leaders but Israel has marched way ahead of us.

Only in the encounter of the people with the revolutionary leaders—in their communion, in their praxis—can this theory be built.

Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be lied to. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.

The ideas of liberty and equality have been an irresistible force in motivating leaders like Patrick Henry, Susan B. Anthony, and Abraham Lincoln, schoolteachers like Nathan Hale and Booker T. Washington, the Philippine Scouts who fought at Bataan, and the soldiers who scaled the bluff at Omaha Beach. If those ideas are worth fighting for — and our history demonstrates that they are — it cannot be true that the flag that uniquely symbolizes their power is not itself worthy of protection from unnecessary desecration.

John Paul Stevens

Once Iran is liberated, and my fellow compatriots are free to elect their leaders and decide on their democratic political system of choice, my foreseeable mission will be accomplished. From that day on, my role will be determined by my compatriots. I will thus serve them in whatever capacity they see fit.

No matter how vast, how total, the failure of man here on earth, the work of man will be resumed elsewhere. War leaders talk of resuming operations on this front and that, but man's front embraces the whole universe.

You know, it used to be that American culture in general understood that we're sinful, but not anymore. Which is why teaching the gospel, starting in Genesis, is important. Sin entered into the world through Adam, as described in Genesis. The problem is that we have Christian leaders compromising God's clear Word in Genesis with evolution, millions of years, or both. If we cannot trust what God says in Genesis, we cannot trust the gospel. Sadly, years of such compromise has greatly weakened the church to now allow for increasing open attacks on those who teach the gospel. Those attacking the gospel are intent on imposing their religion of atheism on this generation of kids.

When people live in freedom, they do not willingly choose leaders who pursue campaigns of terror. When people have hope in the future, they will not cede their lives to violence and extremism. So around the world, America is promoting human liberty, human rights, and human dignity. We are standing with dissidents and young democracies, providing AIDS medicine to bring dying patients back to life, and sparing mothers and babies from malaria. And this great republic born alone in liberty is leading the world toward a new age when freedom belongs to all nations.

While many of our citizens prosper, others doubt the promise, even the justice, of our own country. The ambitions of some Americans are limited by failing schools and hidden prejudice and the circumstances of their birth, and sometimes our differences run so deep, it seems we share a continent, but not a country. We do not accept this, and we will not allow it. Our unity, our union, is the serious work of leaders and citizens in every generation. And this is my solemn pledge: I will work to build a single nation of justice and opportunity. I know this is in our reach because we are guided by a power larger than ourselves who creates us equal in His image. And we are confident in principles that unite and lead us onward.

I have set tangible goals against which I am willing to be judged. Ultimately, though, true and enduring progress in the status and security of women and girls will only be achieved through the collaborative efforts of women and men. There is a need, in my view, for some men to be reminded by male leaders and champions of change that violence towards women and girls is never acceptable and that their female colleagues deserve their trust and respect.

There has been a glaring, unfortunate, display of incompetent strategic leadership within our national leaders. As a Japanese proverb says, 'Action without vision is a nightmare.' There is no question that America is living a nightmare with no end in sight.

Ricardo Sanchez

As a country, we are in a state of denial about issues of race and racism. And too many of our leaders have concluded that the way to remedy racism is to simply stop talking about race.

Companies and leaders who treat knowledge management as just another branch of IT don't understand how human beings learn and create... Unlike land, capital, energy, labor, and technology — the conventional inputs into business practice — knowledge is innately self-renewing. It is produced and consumed simultaneously. Its value increases with use, rather than being depleted as with industrial goods or commodities. Above all, it is a resource created by humans acting in relationship with one another.

If great managers are catalysts, speeding up the reaction between the individual's talents and the company's goals, then great leaders are alchemists. Somehow they are able to transform our fear of the unknown into confidence in the future.

Marcus Buckingham

Before Israel dies, it must be humiliated and degraded. Allah willing, before they die, they will experience humiliation and degradation every day. America will be of no avail to them. Their generals will be of no avail to them. The last of their generals has been forgotten. Allah has made him disappear. He's over. Gone is that Sharon, behind whose back they would hide and find shelter, and with whom they would feel relatively secure. Today they have frail leaders, who don't even know where our Lord placed them. Allah willing, we will make them lose their eyesight, we will make them lose their brains.

In Boresko, the government, though imperial, grants the people some power. They collect annually, and, marching to the palace, signify to the emperor their wishes, which he is constrained to respect. To march at the head of such a procession confers power and influence, and those who thus march are called political leaders.

Alexander Bryan Johnson